"The will to a system lacks integrity." - Nietzsche

I would think that a person such as myself would be an ideal audience for Mr. Wilber's ruminations on mind and spirit. Like the Pandit, I have a broad interest in interdisciplinary approaches to the psyche and the spirit. We share a taste for Eastern and Western philosophy, psychology, and the emerging discourses of self-organization and systems analysis. Yet for the life of me I cannot understand what this book is supposed to add to our understanding.

Wilber is extremely erudite and a strong thinker, I will grant him that. His book draws broadly from the marketplace of ideas and would seem cosmopolitan in a manner of speaking. Yet despite the variety of ideas he examines, this book remains narrowly confined by the basic self-absorption of its project.

What we have here is a work that articulates Wilber's framework for understanding and integrating a wide variety of approaches and techniques under an overarching interpretive system. All of the thoughts and thinkers he considers are neatly arrayed in their respective quadrants on his gigantic graphs. So? What does this get us, other than the intellectual autobiography of one well-read meditator? Is his thinking that it will not occur to researchers that there are other fields of study than their own, without such a framework?

Most of what he says is fairly obvious to anyone who looks at the material he digests for us like a mother bird. There will be readers, of course, who have no desire to come to terms in a meaningful way with the source material, and for them, Wilber will save a lot of reading.

In the final analysis, Wilber is a systematizer, which explains the strangely plastic and lifeless quality of his prose, for systems are strikingly inert. As Hugh Kenner observed, a system can only mechanically unfold, or decay, like the orbit of a satellite.