Streams of Wisdom

I went to a mediation workshop run by Dustin, which I found to be a fantastic and transformative experience. Believe me when I say that I like him as a person and teacher, and so my review of this book is entirely objective.

Streams of Wisdom makes a case for contemporary spirituality, drawing from the integral frameworks of Ken Wilbur and the scholarly work of Harvard professor Daniel P Brown. I’ve discussed Wilbur’s theories in other reviews, and my assessment that it is an abuse of charts with little rigor remains unchanged. Brown is a more interesting scholar. In his long career he conducted conventional research on attachment and trauma in psychology, as well as learning Mahamudra meditation from Tibetan lamas and translating ancient Sanskrit texts into English. Both a clinical psychologist and devout Buddhist, he combined his two passions with academic research on meditation and Eastern mystical traditions.

Brown’s key point was that contrary to the conventional wisdom that there are many paths to a single supreme divine truth, he found major similarities in how different mystical traditions approach personal spiritual growth, diverging in their final results. I’d call this a novel approach to spiritual development.

Conversely, Wilbur’s integral theory is a mush of hierarchies along various axes of poorly defined terms. I can see how waking lives are spent in a “gross” material realm, and dreams access a “subtle” realm, but the “causal” and “non-dual” realms beyond are referred to repeatedly without being defined. The Wilburian point is that we as heirs of the Enlightenment rationality discard pre-modern magical and mythical stages of spiritual development, and that there are post-modern and integral stages beyond. Either you believe this, or you don’t. But Streams of Wisdom did not do a great job of convincing me.

There was a singular moment where a quote struck me so hard that I had to put down the book in shock at the opacity of the writing.

Offering one further example to illustrate the last point listed above will help ground the concepts in actual experience. From the perspective of a non-dual/trans-dual vantage point the apparent subjective and apparent objective aspects of awareness are non-different. As such, the idea of a change in state according to the subject-object co-creation doesn’t exactly make sense. From this trans-dual vantage point everything is the “same taste” of awareness.

It is not better in context. My brother in Buddha, I’ve got a PhD in post-Foucauldian social sciences. I am fully comfortable with heavy jargon and complex ideas. I can’t make heads or tails of this.

Sadly, there are hints of something interesting here, with nods towards the neural correlates of awareness, that “ineffable” mystical states that cannot be described in English do have accurate terminology from Buddhist and Hindu traditions, and that a group of people meditating can share a collective awareness. But these nuggets could be better delivered in a 1200 word blog post. I’m mostly further convinced that Wilbur’s integral theory is a bad acid trip, and that White people should be very cautious about innovations in spiritual matters.