The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything

I picked this up at a remaindered bookstore because Ken Wilbur was mentioned positively at a workshop I went to, and my impression is that this is what happens when someone with an erotic attachment to charts takes a lot of LSD.

Wilbur is one of the founders of integral thought, a philosophical meta-system he’s been pushing since the 1970s. The basic concepts of Wilbur’s thought are that everything exists in a hierarchy of emergent phenomena, that they’re usefully described by the AQAL (All Quadrants All Lines) chart on the axis of interior/exterior and individual/collective, which map roughly to personal experience (interior-individual), culture (interior-collective), external reality (individual-exterior) and social systems (collective-exterior). Oh, and finally and most importantly, there’s a hierarchy of mental states heading towards a transcendent experience of universal integration, and progress along this path can be sped up by meditation, yoga, and similar deliberative practices.

I’m not going to harsh anyone’s vibe, if integral thought is your jam. All I can say is that it feels very retro, and not in a cool way. The stated goal, unifying all forms of knowledge under a single spiritual umbrella, is so ambitious as to be laughable, especially compared to the actual state of the theory.