Nikolai1

Hi Sahaj Yes, for me if it can be talked about then it must be first tier. Second tier is the state of being that unites and recognises the equality of all the quadrants, and recognises the role that all the different colour levels play. The way I see it, the perspectives are all equal at the intellectual level, but in any given moment we must adopt and adhere to one of them because that is what reality demands of us. So practically I pick up the mug with my right-hand, but at the intellectual level I know that the mug would be picked up by the left-hand of the person sat opposite me. The ability to recongise and endorse all the quadrants gives us the creative flexibility that first tier thinkers don't have. The second tier accepts the relativism of the green meme, but does not allow it to intefere with their functional existence. For example we can simultaneosuly accept the spiritual worth of all beings, but this doesn't mean that we need to reject hierarchies based an natural expertise at the top. I think in integral circles there are different versions about the meaning of the term. For some, it relates specifically to scientific reductionism, as you said. For others, and I think this is the most powerful interpretation, its about ignoring 1-3 of the quadrants and focussing on the remainder. In the Glossary on Wilber's website flatland is defined thus: You're definitely right that the first definition is the one you come across most frequently. For me, there are two explanations for this. First, scientific reductionism is still very much of the zeitgeist and the most famous and prestigious thinkers tend to commit this style of flatlanding. The use of the term gets associated with these people. Secondly, as you pointed out, there are a lot of Wilberians who are basically stuck in the Green Meme. They see the scientific reductionists at the orange level as the main enemy and so this pejorative term 'flatlander' is saves especially for them. But yes, you can see the second definition is very much how I think the term is best used. I should say that when I was a young student I independently came up with an identical diagnosis of many of what Wilber calls 'academic foodfights'. Namely, that people focus on one quadrant and ignore the validity of the others, and this is not just something that scientific reductionists are guilty of. So this is why I favour the second defintion. Or at least there needs to be a separate term for this general tendency rather than flatlanding/wonderlanding/Boomeritis. Good talking to you!

Karl I don't want to stop you from answering Brian's simple question, but I just want to clarify the problem with the term concrete. What we come to feel in our everyday lives is that there is a part of us that is more solid and enduring than any of the things in this world, and all the ideas about them. Even though this part of us not materially concrete, it fulfuls all the conditions that we associate with that word: stable, permanent, dependable. This part of us, this peace, is a rock to us. It is always there, or nearby, when everything else comes and goes. So clearly our notion of the term concrete completely changes, indeed, reverses. Therefore when you say it isn't concrete I respectfully disagree!

Yes, 'higher' is a metaphor. Another one I would use is 'deeper'. Which just goes to show how muddled I am!

The thing is with life is that we get these peak moments - of beauty, of happiness, of love and harmony. But they are just peaks, isolated events. But the memory of them makes us look at the times when we are with our children at the swings and all we can think of is our problems at work, or we are watching a movie with our wife and getting bugged by something she said or did earlier that day - and we look at these times and feel like we want to do better. Human nature Karl! Or are you saying that your wife is an unending source of pleasure and that your children always had your attention 100%?

Well it's a nice idea, but that is how we are as human beings. We aren't free to enjoy our work and our children and that is what gives us pain and makes us want a solution. There are many ways of determining truth and thought is just one of them. If we are a happier, more at peace and if our personal reltionships are better we call it 'higher' because this is the territory we were alays aiming for and missing. It just so happens that when we try and put this higher truth into words we find that no word or system can contain it. This is what Wilber refers to with his movement to the second tier.

When you find the higher truth you become anchored - not intellectually - but anchored spiritually in something far more stable and more certain than any thought system. It is because you are well-anchored that you are able to properly engage with the world, with your work, with your children. You no longer try and bypass the world with airy sounding spiritual thought systems. But yes. what you've found can't be talked about.

It is a revelation because all the words you have heard spoken or read have had to 'assume' one of the quadrants in order to be a coherant, sensible statement. Then, out of nowhere, we suddenly see that all the words are provisional only and cannto capture the actual truth. We must have apprehended some sort of higher truth if we are to realise that words cannot describe it. Until this point we work on the assumption that words can and do capture the truth and so therefore argue passionately for w´hatever position we believe in.

Hi Sahaj When we enter 2nd tier, we start to understand AQAL and the equality of all the perspectives that AQAL contains. Prior to this we are incapable of seeing the equality, we prioritise one of the quadrants and try to understand everything with reference to the one quadrant (Wilber calls this 'flatlanding' and it the hallmark of first tier thinking) My basic point is that, firstly the equality of all perspectives comes as a revelation after an immense deal of hard work and confusion. Secondly, it is however easy to take a blue or orange or green attitude to AQAL, and imagine it's 'the truth' for no other reason than you have accepted Wilber as being the source of truth and you just blindly stick to it. You can simultaneously promote AQAL and second-tier thinking while having very little idea about the truly radical and life.changing fact of second-tier being. Scond-tier thinking is not possible, I would say, unlesss there has been some sort of awakening to higher state of consciousness. It is only from this exalted perspective does the equality of the usuall narratives we argue for become obvious. Second-tier thinking is rare, and I'm talking 1% rare. It is not something we can claim for ourselves just because we have adopted Wilber as our teacher. And on this final point, I think Wilber shows signs of misunderstanding this as well. He thinks his students understand him more than they probably do.

Gravity comes as a massive relief when you've always thought it isn't there.

I couldn't do any more than what you get on the internet, but i think at this level Wilber started relying on esoteric texts rather than his own experience.

Yes this sums it up. With wisdom comes the ability to see that a truth is also a no-truth. This gives us options...it opens things up - it lets in the light. The psychotic person belives in a truth, but cannot also see its provisionality. They are therefore bound to it tightly. And because no-one else in the world can see this truth they are isolated, and they have a nagging suspicion that they are in fact insane. The non-psychotic person is simply a person lucky enough to agree with all the people around them. Life hasn't confused them, and they have had no reason to question things. They do not see the provisionality of their truths but this is not harmful to them because their whole society sees things the same and their opinions are shared and endorsed. The conspiracy theorist is somewhere in between these states. It isn't a particularly happy place, though they take a grim satisfaction in their realism and everybody else's gullibility.

If you're concerned about the truth, then there will be a part of you concerned that you are being deceived and this is the root of conspiracy theory thinking which is a form of psychosis. We've all met people who have lost all trust and assume everything to be a distortion. The latest outlet for this seems to be the Zika Virus and what that all means. If you have this firm need for truth, there will be a latency of psychosis. The psychotic person is a person who believes in the truth, but has, for whatever reason, needed to coonstruct a truth that is congruent and commensurate with their feelings while being incongruent with societies favoured narratives. If they are brought up to feel that they can't ever get it right, that they are damned if they and damned if they don't. If one parent says one thing, and the other another thing - these are all the recipe for psychosis. The social isolation that so often precedes a psychotic episode, is the time when the new truths can take root in their mind. We all in society believe in truth, this is perhaps the problem. To recognise that truth is finally inaccesiible to us is liberating and frees to us to find truth in places deeper than intellectual theory.

Obviously admiring Wilber or his system of evolution without passing through it yourself is basically blue or orange thinking. It's just setting someone up as an authority and then following it because that's the right thing to do. The thing is: I genuinely don't think Wilber views his followers like that. He makes comments. He congratulates them on their open-mindedness, on their courage to be evolved. He seems to assume they are all second-tier like him. It's interesting because lots of gurus will be tarnished by the behaviour of the student, and yet the guru can be the last to see that his students aren't getting it. The egoism of the guru is the belief that they are successfully transmitting their understanding. It must be very hard to face the fact that you are quite useless, basically, and it is all down to the student doing their own work.

Conspiracy theorising can never be proven or disproven. When we truly see that, our whole interest in whether we are correct or deceived vanishes and our mindspace is freed in the process. Phase 1 - The experts know best, we trust them. Phase 2 - The experts might be wrong therefore ARE wrong. People at this stage still can't hold contrasting perspectives. They instantly switch from one to the other. Phase 3 - The experts cannot possibly believe they are right. They know the truth but deliberately mislead us. Phase 4 - They must have a reason to mislead us. It is power they want. Phase 5 - We start to talk about new beliefs and encounter resistance. Phase 6 - It starts to dawn on us that we simply do not know, and we lose interest.

I wish there was just one of them though! Spoils the effect somehow.

Karl I've tried to say to you many times that my belief is not the primacy of consciousness. Consciousness - or mind - is just one half of a pair of opposites with matter as the opposite number. I could not give primacy to either one of these. There is no way in wich we can legitimately argue mind as the ontological reality with matter only a version of it. All I know is that matter and mind are both concepts that occur. My identity, if you want to calll it that, totally transcends mere conciousness. I don't think you understand why I say this. I think you read this as being more of the same 'Consciousness is Everything' stuff. But let me tell me some more stuff... I have had experiences where I have gained conscious knoweldge about things I never should have been able to know. The knowledge was therefore prophetic and lets say, mystical. I have also had experiences where it has felt very much like i have created circumstances through pure desire. i say felt, because it felt that way but of course it cannot be demonstrated intellectually that my consciousness really did it. So please try and understand what I'm doing. Self-realisation leads to a kind of illusion, and this is that our consciousness is doing things that we have no way of explaining. If you're wise, you learn to just accept the reality of the process without dogatically pigeon-holing it into some kind of philosphy. Of course when we write, we have no choice but to give the impression that we are doing that. But I am telling you: I do not fit into any of the philosophies that you can think of.

Yes. Because I still ahve phases where I lose my confidence and I feel bewildered by the srange turn my mind has made, Wilber comes a relief and an affirmation. I can imagine that there may come a time when it seems quite irrelevant to me personally...but there will alwys be hoardes who can be comforted as I was. Intellectually I have passed from orange to green to yellow in the space of about 20 years. Throughout the whole process I found less and less people able to understand where my thinking was heading. i did the work enirely myself, by piecing together fragments from the whole of human thought. Wilber did exactly the same, and when I observe the system he came up with it seems like a masterpiece. There is a huge amount of human affinity and I still appreciate that.

Karl - Obviously people like you are one of Wilber's main targets so I'm not surprised that you don't go for him. In his Spiral dynamics model he describes intellectual evolution, and for ease gives each pnase (or meme) a colour. Beige - animal instincts geared towards procuring food, shelter etc. Purple - The unseen or ideal is ackowledged in the form of spirtis, demons etc. Red - Selfhood emerges, but it is not individual selfhood but tribal. So this is where the subject/object split emerges but the subject is not individuated. Blue - Ethical resposibility emerges, but it is not individual. Ethics is strongly conservative. It is doing wat your tribe has always done. Orange - the emergence of individuality, individual will and individual power. It is the phase of science and technology and the subjagation of nature and individual rivals. Wilber specifically references Atlas Shrugged as a philsophy based on this level of intellectual development. Green - Relativistic. Your welfare depends on your neighbour's welfare. All people are equal. All their perspectives are equal. the axioms of logic are an illusion, used to give the impression of infallibly true arguments. The second tier is what comes when you realise that none of these perspectives are better than the other. The flower of the apple tree is not better than the fruit. But anyone still at the green level cannot help but think that their way is superior to the orange while the orange sees the green as a meaningless mush.

Wilber is a prodigy, a miracle. He is undoubtedly the intellectual giant of the late 20th Century and ealy 21st. What he accomplishes is immense, but yes, it's all intellectual. I'll always be a fan. I don't dislike Beethoven's music any the less because the man wrote concertos for Napoleon...and I cannot help but admire Wilber. There is a need for intellectual growth in the spiritual path, and Wilber can be assistance. But perhaps like you, I wonder if lots of his followers aren't really doing that intellectual work. For me the process was difficult intellectually and emotionally agonising. It's so easy to read a Wilber book, but it is surely no shortcut?

Second-tier thinking seems to be a perspective that transcends all the usual dichotomies: inner and outer, individual vs collective. So it takes something very real seeming like say, the body, and describes as nothing more than a version of reality. Our physicality is just one of a number of lenses that we use to talk about reality. For starters, do peope think that this a view that can be simpy taught. It has seemed to me that the human mind will naturally revert to one of the lines of one of the quadrants and that when people imagine they are being integral, they are probably not at all. Like for me, being integral requires a huge amount of intellectual, emotional and spiritual development. Like I my case, I'm aware that I am integral cognitively, but not practically or emotionally. So I wonder whether Wilber's movement, and all the courses and all the disciplines are probably a bit of an illusion? What do we think?

The moment you see yourself in archetypal terms, you have transcended the expression in practical terms. You can't simultaneously know yourself as the Trickster and be the Trickster. This is why recognising the Archetype is healing. It sould feel like a relief. Now I have a handle on it, I don't have ot blindly do it anymore. The Trickster is all about sabotage. It is the perfect antidote to all our pretensions to know what's best and what we want. When we get something that the world will give us recongition for, the Trickster will make sure we don't stop there and get too attached. Therefore to see the Trickster in ourself shows that we are no longer blind.

Yes, I think this is a good way of putting it. I wonder whether this is why Rand isn't taken seriously as a philosopher. Systems like hers had already been represented by thinkers previous to Kant (British Empiricism) and it was the probems with them that made Kant develop his philosophy. Rand is a throwback, and so viewed as somethingn wistful, romantic, immature.

Kant's moral system is not his forte and it is not for his ethics that he is the most important philosopher since Plato. It's his epistemology that sets the bar. Rand was never able to rise to the Kantian challenge . Her thought is as if he never existed.

The number is a symbol. But it is also no mere symbol but a living reality with its own place in the Tao. The number appears in our life like the daffodil appears in the spring. This latter sense is how the numerologist understands the number and there is a great deal of wisdom in it.

Karl- so far off its unrecognisable I'm afraid! When someone is wrong to argue white we must argue black. But that does mean that black is our truth.