I’ve never read anything that I liked by or about pop-spirituality author Ken Wilber. But then, neither have I read any of his books directly. Mostly it’s been people quoting and interpreting him, or else short articles of his I found online.

But he seems really popular, and I’m still not sure why. Actually, I’m starting to get the picture, I think. I just found an essay by some PhD professor of philosophy who is talking about how Wilber proposes a hierarchical scale according to which people can “adjudicate” religious visions. First of all, when people use words like “adjudicate” when they can just say “judge” always throws up a red flag for me.

But anyway, let me try to give it a fair shake before I blow the whole thing up though. The whole purpose of his proposing this ten-point scale for interpreting religious visions is to help people realize that just because they have a dream that they rode motorcycles with Buddha doesn’t mean Buddha actually came to them - and that people will use these types of symbols as containers for this that are personal, rather than necessarily transcendent. So okay, on the one hand, I think that’s a valid point to be made - asking people to look at what is really coming from their own needs and desires as opposed to what might be coming from “God” or what-have-you. Jung tried to move his patients towards a place where they were able to withdraw their own internal projections and perceive people and things as they are.

That said, ultimately the thing that irritates me the most about Wilber’s writings on spiritual matters is that he refuses to recognize and label his own projections. I find his writing to be frought with a lop-sided reliance on rationality, which I find personally very limiting in the study of psycho-religious phenomena. Here’s a great example from that essay; the first part is an actual quote from Wilber, and the second is the text of the author interpreting that.

[Wilber:]
“Degree of authenticity” refers to the relative degree of actual transformation delivered by a given religion (or world view). This is a vertical scale: “more authentic” means more capable of reaching a higher level (and not merely integrating the present level). “Degree of legitimacy” refers to the relative degree of integration, meaning-value, good mana, ease of functioning, avoidance of taboo, and so forth within any given level. This is a horizontal scale; “more legitimate” means more integrative-meaningful within that level.”

[Essayist:]
Hence, following these important distinctions made by Wilber, there can be a hierarchical structural adjudication of visions, determining the authenticity of the religious encounter (employing Wilber’s developmental cartography, is it happening on stage 3,4,7, or 8?). And secondly, there can be a horizontal-translative appraisement, measuring the degree of legitimacy that the particular apparition has.

I mean, to me this kind of talk just seems like a hall of mirrors. Infinite regress, I think they call it. Anyway, I also really take issue with the idea being promulgated here that this sort of weird classification system is actually of more importance than the contents of the vision. Check this shit out:

The important question concerning the authenticity of religious visions, as Wilber clearly points out, is not one of content (structurally speaking, it matters little if one beholds the Virgin Mary, Buddha, or Krishna), but of context. That is, on which level of consciousness is the vision seen? Is it a subconscious dream image? A psychic intuition? Or, a genuine encounter with a subtle plane deity? It is only after such a contextual-structure determination that the critical phenomenologist can then proceed to analyze the content of the vision properly, assessing its degree of legitimacy. That is, how well does the particular image integrate the perceiver, within that hierarchical level?

If you really are experiencing religious visions, psychic or psychological insights, or even if you just have a dream that you’re trying to understand, this is a sure road to failure, as far as I’m concerned. This sort of excessive intellectualizing, all it does is distance you from whatever the message which your deeper mind or your soul or Jesus or Krishna is actually trying to transmit to you. If you sit there and say “the content’s not important, but this hierarchical organization for jack-offs is important” than you’re just gonna run around in little irritating circles your whole life and feel completely unfulfilled and confused and fucked up no matter how many “cartographic hierarchical structuralist” ham sandwiches you manage to stick up your butt.

I’m much more into the sorts of techniques which Jung proposed, which actually seek to get past the logical rational controlling demiurgic ego. One of his main techniques was called amplification. Some random author I just found online presents a decent explanation of how amplification works:

You take, for instance, a dream that presents you with an image. That image may seem obviously very mysterious to you. You may not know what to make of it. Then, in order to understand what the symbolic image received in the dream might mean, you might start looking for something similar in fairy tales, in religions, in other different contexts. Then it becomes clearer what those dream symbols might mean. If you go to one or two or three places, the images of your dreams start to have a multi-dimensional aspect that you otherwise wouldn’t see, and therefore you begin getting an intuition of what the dream might mean, of what your unconscious might want to tell you.

Personally, I think limiting it to religious and fairy tale sources is silly, especially since pop culture stories are much more culturally important and potent for the average person today. But follow whatever path seems appropriate. The idea here is to allow your vision or your dream symbol space to breathe. When you first perceive it, it may not make rational sense, and it’s important not to force it to. What you want to do instead is feed it with other images which “feel” related to it, or which somehow resonate. By doing this, you begin to perceive what feels right and what feels wrong about the different things you juxtapose. You start to perceive subtleties in these relationships, and eventually, you allow the meaning locked within the symbol to expand into the rest of your psyche, based around all these roads and bridges you built to sustain it. It then can become a center of creative energy.

But if you sit there and say what the image represents or says doesn’t matter, then you effectively shut it off. You imprison it in a system of rules and regulations instead of giving it life and breath, which is much more important and useful at the end of the day.