Where are we going?

I'd better get the measure of that 'Norman Einstein' book critiquing Wilber and and decide on my response. Don't like to admit it, but I've got a lot riding on the Ken Wilber legacy. To he or she who says 'You're lost if you rely on hoping,' I reply 'I'm not just hoping, I'm walking my talk, putting my money where my mouth is. And what specifically are you doing to confront your issues?'

But my initial impression is that Geoffrey D Falk, the writer of the 'Norman Einstein' book, is coming from a sceptical-academic angle. This gives him the freedom to home in on factual details which, he argues, do not stand up, but also gets him out of any responsibility to look at what Ken Wilber offers overall. For example, Wilber has made a broad synthesis of just about all the 'contemplative traditions' and religions of the world, east and west, and drawn out similar patterns from among them. This venture doesn't lend itself to hard-nosed research, in fact what could research-based science say at all about the different stages of psychospiritual development that an individual goes through as they evolve through the 'normal' stages and perhaps into the stages beyond that? So Norman Einstein's critique is, to this extent at least, beside the point.

Further investigation is warranted.


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Meditating this morning was tough. It may be hard to see why sitting for half an hour counting your breaths could be tough, but it is. First the brain rebels, and goes off on any plausible pretext to amuse itself thinking, thinking, thinking. Then the body gets restless, and one is drawn strongly to getting up, going somewhere else, doing something, anything but this. Resistance is occurring. Then (back to the mind) questions plague the brain: why am I doing this? What am I expecting to get out of it? What difference can this make to my mind? Or any other part of me? How can I bear such boredom? How soon can I look at my watch again? Resistance is still occurring. What is this going to change in my life?

Anyway, by the time I got through it I was exhausted and lay down and rested for twenty minutes.

At breakfast we talked about the film we watched last night – 'Entre les murs', or 'The Class'. It gave a horrifying glimpse of life in a Paris secondary school. A dysfunctional system, where teachers have a fuzzy humanitarian outlook and secure jobs, but are completely overwhelmed, practically and intellectually, by the situation. Faced by a rising tide of behaviour problems, they devote staff meeting time to consideration of a points system to manage discipline, then after ten minutes of indecisive exchange of opinions, the principal closes off the topic and takes them on to working out what to do about the staff room coffee machine. In class the main character, French teacher Francois puts up a heroic struggle in the face of defiance, apathy, jaw-droppingly poor background levels, and succeeds in getting a level of interest from his unpromising class of 14 year-olds. A particularly disruptive girl loudly accuses him of victimising the class problem boy, triggering an angry and insulting outburst from the boy in question, who then gets up and storms out, swinging his bag as he goes and inadvertently bumping another girl on the eyebrow, causing loss of blood.


Then in the morning news I read of the millions (something like 50 million if I remember right) of working poor in the US who work long hours without earning enough to feed themselves or their families, going to bed, getting up in the morning, going to work hungry and staying hungry all day. Eggs a luxury, meat an exotic rarity, only the cheapest, most bodiless bread affordable. Semi-permanent starvation. And they're the ones with jobs.


And then the article with video of the people who went to watch the police at an environmental demonstration in the UK, who took some photos and asked a policeman to give his number, who were then thrown on ground, stood on, handcuffed, legs tied, taken away and left in jail for four days, without being allowed to contact solicitors or make a phone call.


And the point of all this bad news? The deterioration of our societies continues apace, perhaps accelerating. This is the world we live in. Where does this end? When we look around at this as older people, we see it sliding into catastrophe, but there's a feeling that having left the workforce we are not altogether relevant – it will go on with or without our input. Younger people don't often offer a comment, perhaps the trend is too alarming for them.


But while the slide goes inexorably on, there's another trend happening at the same time: the gentle revolution of people who are realising the self-destructive course the world is on, and taking action in the only arena where we have significant choice – the arena of the self. And this is one of the things the meditation is about. At first sight it seems ludicrous to hold that my personal development will make any difference in the world at large. How could it? It can be a very complex issue to get into, because any answer, even the terms of any answer, is likely to be contentious.


One way of looking at this would be to put it in the developmental terms offered by spiral dynamics. In this approach, humanity, societies and individuals all go through the same stages of development in the same unchangeable sequence. The stages can be labelled in different ways, but the relevant stage/labels at this point are individual-egocentric, ethnocentric, and world-centric. First I'll ask you to allow that the monstrous inequalities in society arise from greed, and that the fascist tendencies of our governments and their appointed authorities are about protecting the privileges of the status quo, i.e. the current inequalities. Going on from there, it's not difficult to reason that the greed and the privilege-guarding are the products of an egocentric mental stage, along the lines of: I'll wring all the possible advantage from the system that I can, and it's all for me. … That's hardly altruism.


Now, the description of the stages of development of societies is something that has been documented and in broad terms agreed upon by a number of sociologists and other researchers. Wilber related that developmental scale to the stages of personal spiritual development described by the ancient eastern traditions, and correlated it with the intellectual-emotional stages set out by the likes of Piaget in the west.


The point we're getting to, is that at the world-centric stage of emotional, social or psychospiritual development, a person is not going to be motivated primarily by greed. It can't work that way. Any lurking critics may at this point want to challenge the whole concept of people or societies developing to any 'world-centric' stage as an item on a fuzzy-wuzzy new-age 'wish list for the world'. Well, on the one hand, there exist people who approach life on the basis of living with their share of resources, and on the basis of social equity, and these people are observable. And the character and outlooks of more spiritually advanced human beings have been recorded in various places around the world, and those recorded are just those that are known about, there's no reason to think that there weren't others.


I'm getting bogged down trying to provide a hard-edged irrefutable case for my point of view. And this is leading me into a corner, because once I start referring to the growing trend for people to develop to the world-centric stage, half my readers or more are going to drown me out with their jeers, or just move on to check their emails. I'll brave that risk, and just say that there is a trend going that way, you just have to look at the popularity of people like Ekhart Tolle (Ekhart even being further popularised by Oprah Winfrey!), Ken Wilber, and a whole raft of others, to see that there's a thirst for a new kind of paradigm for living, and that it's growing, and more and more people are seeing that we can't go on the way we are going and the only way to change it is to change ourselves.


PHEW, THAT WASN'T EASY! Much more like that and no-one will read this.



Perhaps I should leave the justifying at that for today, except for one small further angle that has occurred to me over the last day or so. That is simply that there are dimensions of human existence which I am not living, at least consciously, and I want to explore all the possibilities available to me, consciously. They say that we are living all the states all the time, but that our ego-bound consciousness won't let us realise this. So I'm making the commitment do what it takes to bring it to consciousness, or to remember it.