Product Description

In this tour de force of scholarship and vision, Ken Wilber traces the course of evolution from matter to life to mind and describes the common patterns that evolution takes in all three of these domains. From the emergence of mind, he traces the evolution of human consciousness through its major stages of growth and development. He particularly focuses on modernity and postmodernity: what they mean; how they impact gender issues, psychotherapy, ecological concerns, and various liberation movements; and how the modern and postmodern world conceive of Spirit. This second edition features forty pages of new material, new diagrams, and extensively revised notes.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #119969 in Books
• Published on: 2001-01-02
• Released on: 2001-01-02
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 851 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781570627446
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
This is the first in a projected set of three volumes charting recent thought in the title's interrelated areas, the title itself being a slight misnomer since sex and ecology are the foci of the forthcoming volumes. Here, however, Wilber elaborates at great length several contemporary systematic theories concerned with the biological, psychological, spiritual and metaphysical aspects of life and the various evolutionary stages of each. He then offers an overview of spiritual practices that can lead to an evolved "omega point" of consciousness. Wilber, a transpersonal psychologist and the author of No Boundary, among other works, has unfortunately tried too hard to cram everything possible into this massive undertaking. The result is that even the hundreds of pages of notes (sometimes useful, sometimes merely repetitive) become a mass of ideas and names. Wilber is a well-read, sophisticated and energetic thinker; yet his style veers from the discursively expansive to the overly condensed. Those seeking A Theory of Everything will be more than satisfied. For others, the book's sheer length and lack of organization may make this a very frustrating read.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
This is a sprawling synthesis of evolutionary and "systems" theory from the Presocratics to Piaget, permeated by the mysticism of Plotinus. Odd as it may seem for a book with more than 500 pages of text and 200 of notes, it suffers from a tendency to make unsubstantiated or inadequately referenced claims, especially in passing references to various feminisms and postmodernisms. But the reader can take this to be one aspect of the book's oral character: it reads like a composition dictated and transcribed. That is a strength as well as a weakness, since it imparts a lively and passionate tone to a text that could become simply tedious. The book's greatest strengths are its ambitious scope and its relentless attention to the materialist flattening of evolutionary and developmental theories in Western tradition. Wilber follows earlier devotees of Plotinus in insisting on a world composed not of parts and wholes but of wholes that are also parts and parts that are also wholes--wholes within wholes, remarkably similar to the "monads" of Anne Conway and Leibniz. Given a widespread hunger for spirituality and a widespread misunderstanding of materialist readings of development, even a flawed attempt to deepen developmental perspectives with developmental insights from mysticism is a step in the right direction. Steve Schroeder

Review
"A timely and bold wake-up call for humanity."—San Francisco Chronicle



"Hugely informed, outspoken, and deeply illumined, Ken Wilber's penetrating insights uplevel the whole game of understanding human beings and human history."—Branches of Light



"The scope of the work is extraordinary. Only a handful of thinkers, such as Aurobindo in the East and Hegel in the West, have assembled such vast evolutionary visions. Yet Wilber's view is unique not only in providing a far-reaching vision but also in grounding that vision in contemporary research in fields such as cosmology, biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and ecology."—Roger Walsh, Resurgence



"Wilber possesses the rare combination of a deep, advanced spiritual practice with a sharp wit, brain power and scholarship to rival the finest Princeton Ph.D. . . . Sex, Ecology, Spirituality rewards the reader with a comprehensive, nondualistic, and sophisticated analysis of our world and consciousness."—Green Living



"Wilber's book is essential reading as a transplanetary survey of our problems and our possibilities. This is a book to live with for the next five years, and carry with you long into the next century."—David Boadella, Journal of Family Life



"Wilber is without a doubt one of the most significant thinkers of our time and brings a fresh understanding to our cultural situation and the prospects for an integral worldview in the next century. He displays a staggering erudition . . . a profound intuitive understanding and a highly developed analytical capacity. The combination is breathtaking. . . . Any thinker concerned with the big picture will find Wilber's work a gold-mine of insights which make compulsory reading for the 21st century."—Network: The Scientific and Medical Network Review



"Exhaustive exploration of the history of consciousness."—Parabola



"I think the most significant recent development in the field [of Transpersonal Psychology] is the publication of Ken Wilber's book, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality . I would encourage anyone interested in exploring the field in depth to read this volume."—Gnosis Magazine

"The twenty-first century literally has three choices: Aristotle, Nietzsche, or Ken Wilber. This book, written with remarkable scholarly breadth and depth, is exactly the medicine we need for the new century and the new millennium: not because it will make us feel good, which it surely might, but because it can jolt us awake."—Jack Crittenden, Ph.D., author of Beyond Individualism

Customer Reviews

Wilber integrates and transcends.
Emerson wrote of Shakespeare, "his mind is the horizon beyond which, at present, we do not see," and the same may be said of Ken Wilber. Wilber wrote SEX, ECOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY (hereafter, "SES") during a "three-year silent retreat"--"I lived the hermit's life; I saw exactly four people in four years," he recalls (p. xii), and in SES he lays the foundation for his integral philosophy, which he develops more fully in his subsequent books. Wilber was seeking "a world philosophy," in writing SES, he explains. "I sought an integral philosophy, one that would believably weave together the many pluralistic contexts of science, morals, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world's great wisdom traditions. Not on the level of details--that is finitely impossible, but on the level of orienting generalizations: a way to suggest that the world really is one, undivided, whole, and related to itself in every way: a holistic philosophy for a holistic Kosmos: a world philosophy, an integral philosophy" (p. xii).

In SES, Wilber unfolds "a broad orienting map of men and women's place in the larger Kosmos (of matter, life, mind, and spirit)" that "naturally touches on a great number of topics that have recently become 'hot,' from the ecological crisis to feminism, from the meaning of modernity and postmodernity to the nature of "liberation" in relation to sex, gender, race, class, creed; to the nature of techno-economic developments and their relation to various worldviews; to the various spritual and wisdom traditions the world over that have offered telling suggestions as to our place in a larger scheme of things" (p. 6). SES is a "cry of anger and anguish" (p. xxiii) against homogenized "flatland" paradigms, and is likely to alarm ecophilosophers, feminists, and fundamentalists, alike. We are on the "verge of planetary transformation" (p. 204), and Wilber is investing his hope in the "integrative power of vision-logic." He writes, "it is vision-logic with its centauric/planetary worldview that, in my opinion, holds the only hope for the integration of the biosphere and noosphere, the supranational organization of planetary consciousness, the genuine recognition of ecological balance, the unrestrained and unforced forms of global discourse, the nondominating and noncoercive forms of federated states, the unrestrained flow of worldwide communicative exchange, the production of genuine world citizens, and the enculturation of female agency (i.e., the integration of male and female in both the noosphere and biosphere)--all of which, in my opinon, is nevertheless simply the platform for the truly interesting forms of higher and transpersonal states of consciousness lying yet in our collective future--if there is one" (p. 192). Wilber covers a lot of ground in SES, making it difficult to summarize. Immensely challenging at times, and drawn from "voluminous research material," at the center of Wilber's philosophy, "surfaces extend; interiors intend--it's still almost as simple as that" (p. 134) he explains. "Going within = going beyond = greater embrace" (p. 263). SES should be read and then reread as an essential, visionary handbook for the new millennium.

G. Merritt

It will blow your paradigm- over and over again...
Ken Wilber's "Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution", is my favorite book. And that isn't a title I award lightly.

SES is quite possibly the first attempt at putting together a syncretic, evolutionary worldview since Hegel's "Phenomenology". In an age when truth has been declared dead and multiple perspectives rule the roost, where philosophy lives in the shadow of Nietzsche's madman, Wilber, in this striking volume, challenges post-modernity. Unlike other challengers, arguing for a retreat to conservatism and cynical (or mythic-literal) traditionalism, Ken proposes a different idea- we need to integrate the strengths of Post-modernity (a recognition of the other, a bird's eye view of ideology, and a profound social and ecological awareness), Modernity (scientific rationality, empiricism, democracy), and Pre-modernity (religious wisdom and cultural bounty) into one complete, "integral" package.

Sounds like a tough mission for any thinker to take on. Of course, Wilber- living outside the academia, blending his scholastic persuits with Zen practice, and doing his best to live his own philosophy- is no ordinary thinker. In the 551 pages of text (not including extensive endnotes and bibliography), Wilber essentially lays out his "theory of everything". Based in the psychological work of Freud, Piaget, Kohlberg, Maslow, Jung, Gebser, and other thinkers, Wilber first constructs a socio-psychological map of civilization's evolution to date, and shows how it integrates with hard scientific data. Dividing the world into subject and object, Wilber shows how modern empiricism has attempted to colonize the subjective sphere by trying to render it irrelevant- a condition he refers to as "flatland". After providing this analysis, Wilber takes a gander at the cognitive structures still lying in our future, through several examples of such advanced minds- Emerson, St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, Ramana Maharshi, and Meister Eckhart. After that, Wilber takes on the disease of the Post-modern world and it's primary culprits- a dissociation between what he refers to as the "Eco" camps (romantic, back-to-nature, web-of-life, holistic) and the "Ego" camps (rationalistic, modernistic, atomistic, disassociating the mind and body), and how these two contradictory (and self-contradictory) worldviews are becoming extremely destructive- in political discourse, academia, and the world in general.

Of course, as has been said before about SES, it's very hard to sum up in a simple outline- the book itself is practically a 500+ page outline. The main thrust of the work is to construct a coherent philosophy for the 21st century, and thus Wilber spends little time on details (which will be covered further in the next two volumes, Kosmic Karma and Creativity and The Spirit of Post-Modernity). But, that weakness aside, Wilber has proven himself the finest philosophical mind of the early 21st century, and the first great step beyond Foucault, Derrida, and the rest of the post-modern mess.

Although SES is an excellent book, it's not light reading, and readers without a background in philsophy, psychology, or cultural studies should take a look at a simpler introduction to Wilber's work, such as A Brief History of Everything- the condensed, more conversational version of SES.

Feeds the soul and feeds the intellect, but not both at once
For me, the modern age is characterized by some interesting excesses, and Wilber satisfyingly identifies many of them in his spiritual journey here. Three favorite targets I found were: (1) the attempt to make things simpler than they really are in order to explain them, which analytic philosopher Dan Dennett calls "greedy reductionism," (2) the "rage against reason" found in much postmodernism that rejects the notion of objective reality and confident knowledge; and (3) extreme conservative thinking unable to come to grips with the vision of a complex evolving universe.

Wilber has a brilliant imagination and he is a very engaging writer, and this book (probably his best) deals with all three of those excesses in a fascinating way. His overall approach is not original of course (it is essentially a spiritual interpretation of systems and process metaphysics, but there are some very original elements sprinkled here and there. And probably the best thing about this book is that it does a competent job of presenting and integrating ideas from many diverse fields, in addressing the modern excesses, and trying to come up with a satisfying spiritual worldview for our complex age.

This is beautifully ironic, since what he attempts is the very essence of reductionism (!), something Wilber rails against mightily in this book when the "reductionists" disagree with his ideas because the "reduction" is not spiritually meaningful.

For comparison, the conservative religious/creationist critique of Darwinism holds that a universe composed of material elements that interact algorithmically ("machines") cannot also contain spiritual meaning. The Catholic Pope avoided that bind in support of evolution by imbuing material with living Spirit. Wilber uses the metaphysics of systems and processes rather than living Spirit, making his version, (like that of theologian Haught), noticeably more (if still imperfectly) compatible with the scientific worldview.

But this attack of reductionism while using to make his point is the big flaw, to me, in an otherwise very compelling, ambitious, and scholarly synthesis of many of the most profound ideas ever recorded in human thinking.

Indeed, this book seems like it would be sure to appeal to a wide variety of people who, like me, are looking for a way of making sense of our world where we don't bury our head in the sand against uncomfortable aspects of the scientific worldview, nor reject the implications of being spiritual beings who crave meaning.

Technically, the main problem I found is Wilber's annoyingly spotty attention to analysis (which seems worse because he does it reasonably well when he does it), in favor of linking ideas through metaphor. It makes his ideas flow like repetitive New Age spiritual poetry, from science to theology to philosophy and back again, but it doesn't quite hold together for me. It feeds the soul in many places, and feeds the intellect in many places, but not quite both at once.

If this was just a book of inspiring metaphor, the science would be distracting, and as a work of argumentation it is largely devoid of rigor. The result is arguably appropriate to the topic, since one of his targets is the dictatorship of materialist reasoning in science. However, he seems to lapse briefly into some of the excesses of postmodernism or even wishful superstition when after building a perfectly good concept from the ground up, he throws out conclusions that only fit by analogy. The usual leap of faith needed to appreciate any book of religion is then required. This contrasts with the well-reasoned argument leading up to that point. It is perhaps, as other reviewers pointed out, that he has taken on so very much.

He is left, sadly, with the same problems that some populists of complexity theory have, their passion for applying their ideas goes beyond what they've actually demonstrated... they _could_ (probably ?) well be right, but they've at that point only built an illusion of scientific soundness by telling a masterful story.

This encyclopedic book joins Murphy's masterpiece, "Future of the Body," as another magnificent attempt to construct a new spirituality out of scientific, humanistic, and religious traditions. I applaud his efforts, and I think this is a very worthy book that introduces in understandable form many important complex ideas that most people would otherwise not have the chance to engage. For the sake of space, I'd like to refer interested readers to many of the excellent points made in Frederick Polgardy's very fine review previously here.