I had quite a bought of existential / personal reckoning during this read. My partner can attest. Nothing captures this book like crying while making a quesadilla.
I didn’t finish the whole thing because I thought it went downhill after the first few chapters. The most successfully presented chapter is on “shadow material”. Ken Wilber’s so called “Transpersonal Psychology” is an adept model for reckoning with behaviors and thoughts from the mundane to the neurotic.
The biggest theory that this results in is an “Integral ‘Theory of Everything’”. Yes, I KNOW, its quite the tempting title for a theory. Doesn’t it sound so totalistic that it might work? Well... it *kinda* does... but also, definitely doesn’t.
What does definitely work is his integration of multiple theories of human developments in the areas of cognition, behavior, biology, and systems theory. I’ve never / used seen a heuristic more helpful than his “AQAL” map that integrates these theories. As a person (or scholar) you can move from reckoning with Implicit bias in the realm of the personal, to the realm of the biological, and finally to the realm of systems theory.
In short, it is a kind of “super-information-highway” with very detailed exit signs, speed limits, and mapping. It’s efficient, useful, and potentially revolutionary in dealing with the question: “What comes ‘after’ post-modernism?”
HOWEVER, I stopped reading because it tries to answer the previous question with some sort of definitive “evolutionary” game of one-up-man-ship. It would do well to provide less answers and ask deeper and more complex questions.
The one scholastic endeavor which I think the book takes to task is the idea of “holarchies” vs. “hierarchies”. To many people (myself included) the word hierarchy is tainted with the stench of oppression—and for good reason. However, as an educator, I certainly see how Maslow’s Hierarchy of of needs is different from the “Hierarchical organization of Jeff Bezos’s Amazon”. Don’t you?
With that being said, the later chapters are a little too engaged in slightly too “pious” new-age ideas. I’m all for a radical spirituality, but it felt to quid pro quo in what it was proposing. In short, it felt like a set of directions, not a set of deeply moving questions.
& & &: I’m still counting this for a book I read this year, simply for the hours of emotional labor I put into this thing lmao (re: the tear filled quesadilla.)