very !

thank u

xo

 

This is a point that keeps coming up in Integral World. The criticism is that Wilber keeps making references to "research shows that X is simply ..." and yet there is no "research" that anyone can find that shows this.

So, is this a fatal problem?

I think an interesting issue is to look at the assumptions being made by those who are failing to find empirical research.

What I am wondering is this. Wilber has bitten off the biggest chunk of all - the Kosmos. And what is tricky about the Kosmos, is that various events at various levels would seem to require different kinds of evidence which ... are only meaningful understood by different organs of knowing.

So, the first question I ask is - what form would evidence have to arrive in, and what state of consciousness is best suited to receiving and making proper discriminations against that evidence?

500 or so of the greatest minds today have all been attacking Integral Theory for about 10 years, and over and over they have approached it as a matter of "where is the empirical data" that I can "think about with my discursive mind" and "compare analytically" with other claims.

The notion of a "community of the adequate" is important in my opinion. Legitimate knowledge can be shared and transmitted among those who are "adequate" to recognize it, without there being statistics and data and formulae that permits replication by a person outside of the community.

So, let's look at the causal. For the term to be meaningful, there must be some attribute of the state that distinguishes it from subtle, and yet, it cannot be non-dual.

Might it be the case that one's prehension of causal can be assessed by a community of the adequate? That is, by those who have sufficient familiarity with the state. (That's not me, by the way.)

To ask for empirical data as support in this case is to ask for the community of the adequate to attend to and speak on the matter.

A valuable approach to referencing the landscape of states is the negative approach - by saying what it is not. Is there a way to refer to the causal state by way of what attributes it does not have?

corey, i was intrigued by how 'the leading edge of evolution' has become 'the bleeding edge of evolution'. is this anything like the beatles' 'let it be' becoming the stones 'let it bleed'?

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Hi Schalk,

I just wanted to respond to your statement on legitimate knowledge and the community of the adequate (or competent). This idea of course is part of Wilber's Integral Post-Metaphysics and his 3 strands of good knowledge (injunction-experience-communal confirmation/rejection).

My concern about your statement on the  community of the adequate being the only one's able to assess the validity of any claim, whether or not the validity claim can be reproduced by those outside of the community, is that it leads to a very dangerous slippery slope. One simple example may suffice...take a group of radical Islamic terrorist, who all agree that during salat Allah has commanded them to extol Allah's wrath against the western infidels by sending another plane into an American skyscraper. Using Wilber's truth claim criteria, one could easily argue that their knowledge (and action) is legitimate.

I do want to make it clear that I am a big supporter of Wilber's (and I-I's) work. But when it comes to claims made regarding states of consciousness and their substance and meaning, we do need more data. If the causal state is an apophatic phenomenon, then even a community of the competent cannot discuss it (which is partly my point with fairyfaye).

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When you are asleep the world appears dimly like a dream. Wake up, then, and see the world as it is.

Schalk,

I would like to see if we could explore your last question, i.e. looking at the causal state by what it lacks, rather that what it has. Now I understand that most of us (or at least myself) could not be considered competent in accessing (and assessing) the causal state, but I do think we all have access to it.

So I'll get us started by saying what I don't find in the causal state is any sense of a limited, egoic being called my self. In fact all boundaries seem to fade, and the usual subject/object dichotomy of the gross waking state disappears. The other thing I can't find in the causal state is any sense of time. I can sense no beginning, and no end because time ceases to have meaning. I also lose all sense of causality.

Kant argued that our interpretations of existence (including sense of self, temporality, and causality) actually arise because of inherent structures of our mind that essentially project those interpretations onto the noumenal world (the world as it is in itself). So I wonder if in the causal state we are disengaging those aspects of mind/brain that cause us to experience those phenomenon as real.

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When you are asleep the world appears dimly like a dream. Wake up, then, and see the world as it is.

Right.

I think you are on to something.

* Absence of the "self", of boundaries, subject-object awareness, time, causality.

A loosening of that "meaning making constructor" that Kant refers to - a very simple experiencing of the most pure form of awareness that can still be said to have form (as opposed to a Pure Witnessing lacking relative form).

So, we now have to try and address the concern that the community of the adequate will make use of the experience or knowledge obtained from the experience in ways that are not ... felicitous (a terrorist).

The causal state of course is a state. How that experience is interpreted and applied in action is a function of the "stage" of development of the interpreter and actor, right?

A highly developed Islamic devout may routinely access causal awareness, and then through an amber or ethnocentric level of values or self development, apply the knowledge in ways that are less than worldcentric.

Is this right?

Yes, you have stated it accurately. And so, I ask, how do we ascertain who is at what stage when they experience a particular state? Is Integral Institute going to be accepted as the final arbiter of all disputes?  I should add an aspect of my daily experience...I live in one of those blue square states (i.e a state of the United States) that Ken repudiates. So how do I convince the evangelical Christian that all Jews, Muslims, Buddhist, and Hindus are not going to Hell, and that their perspectives deserve review?  

But back to the question of the causal state. I like the phrase "the loosening of 'meaning making constructor(s)'. This may be a better descriptor of 2nd tier structure-stage development than state-stage development, but we are getting somewhere. 

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When you are asleep the world appears dimly like a dream. Wake up, then, and see the world as it is.

How do we ascertain who is at what stage ...?

Great question.

I am kind of leery of this project that some people seem to favor. Figuring out "what stage" someone is at.

There's a group at Harvard working on a test to determine the stage of leaders. Katie Heikenin I believe. There is a group in Texas called Stagen I believe that is involved in applied determinations of stages.

I am very suspicious of this whole endeavor. When I think it through I see what ends up happening. The ramifications are actually invidious.

I think it is appropriate to study and apply the stage principles, but not to get into assigning them to particular people.

After all, the stages are broken down across lines. So, we have to talk about the cognitive stage and the self stage and the emotional stage and the values stage. If we don't do this, we are really just kind of stabbing at a generalized target in the dark. Am not sure if the good it does outweighs the harm.

Backing up to a meta-concern of mine: I am also leery of just about all "talk" about "what" things "are" anyway! As if things "really" "are" that way!

Maybe it is more important to talk about how things seem to work. And to rely on what can be observed.

When we get into interpretations, we rapidly slide into La-la land, talking about all kinds of "things" that "really are" a certain "way" and the whole while we are not even referring to the "same" "attributes" of these "things" so, when we agree it is almost by accident! And when we disagree, we are not even talking about the same thing, so any disagreement is just plain stupid.

An expression of truth is a way of saying, this is a way of predicting how something will behave. We could benefit much more by studying how things behave and then packaging our statements about what "things are" in "truth" as statements about "what we can predict will happen given certain conditions."

I recall my college philosophy instructor who started the first class by saying "2 plus 2 equals 5." Of course, that got us thinking. And his point was, "I am saying it is 5. You can agree or disagree with that, but without knowing the rules that I am using to add numbers, it is meaningless to say that I am wrong."

I am struck by how much Integral discussion seems to be inquiries into how many angels can dance on the tip of a needle. Yes, there is a point where correct interpretation has to come in, but so often I see us struggling to interpret that which we have almost no data or observation to begin with!

How have we gotten so delusional?

Hi Schalk,

I actually fully agree with you on stage analysis as applied to individuals. I'm reminded of courses I've taken on Spiral Dynamics, the Enneagram, and Myers-Briggs...soon the participants stop seeing people, and all they can see are colors, or numbers, or confusing jumbles of letters :) 

As a conceptual map of human development and statistical trends on behavior, I think stage analysis is useful. Using it to categorize individual people is invidious, which is part of my concern of Ken making fun of my many Blue/Amber neighbors.

As to your second point/meta-concern, if I were to re-phrase your statements I would say your concerned about metaphysical speculation, and would prefer a more empirical approach. Is that a fair analysis, or did I misinterpret your point.

And finally, I'll redirect us a bit to consider again what do we mean by our experience of the causal state?

 

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When you are asleep the world appears dimly like a dream. Wake up, then, and see the world as it is.

One of my roles in the Integral community is to remind people that ... there is a season for everything.

A time to grow and a time to translate.

A time to be enlightened and a time to be John Doe.

A time to taste causal and a time to be awake to time and space.

Starting back in about February, I started chiming in, very much alone, about how the America I know would ultimately find John McCain more acceptable as a President. I kept waiting for someone to join me and acknowledge that there is a horde of people known as American voters who:

are simple people with simple values and are not sophisticated or interested in making friends when it means compromising a certain core integrity....

I am sitting here reading how white women are flocking to Palin. This absolutely confirms what I was reading about the America I know.

It is much simpler than lofty stages of consciousness altitude.

The watchword is simplify, simplify. Keep it simple.

I could not fathom America buying this lofty and nebulous package offered up by Obama, and I am still saying to this day, that a good chunk of the people who are still telling the pollsters ... "Obama is my man" are going to ditch him when it is time to vote in November.

I think we could have a modified version of the Rodney King riots in November when the votes are counted and people realize just how many people ditched Obama. It will be the great moment of reckoning in America!

On the second issue, I am aware that there is a place for theory. But, I have always found that there a lot of people who claim to doing theory who are actually just sort of cherry picking metaphysical observations and tossing them around without any discipline that would bring about a systemic framework.

Wilber has sometimes been accused of playing fast and loose on the theory front - cherry picking different concepts, tossing in "evidence" and "supporting data" that no one can really challenge, and then claiming to arrive at "theory."

So, unless we are being rigorously theoretical, shouldn't we pay more attention to "how things seem to be actually working empirically?"

I am still waiting for someone to talk coherently about how it feels to experience the causal state of awareness.

Let's assume that we can describe anything we experience, and that we can agree that, although the description may not "truly" represent the state, it at least can point at it and frame it in terms of what it is not.

Why in the heck are we not hearing glorious descriptions of causal states of experience?

Is it because we are too shy? Why don't want to appear stupid?

Or is it because no one really knows what the hell it means?

Until we know what we are talking about, maybe we should talk about things that we can actually observe.

That's my sense of it.

I really hate pretentiousness and delusional inferences.

I hate it and my shadow hates it! We are in agreement there...

That was an enjoyable read. I can't disagree with anything you said.

But I will take another stab at the causal state description, because I do think there is something to it, though I don't think it's what people hope it will be. When I enter a state that seems to fit the descriptors available for the causal state, I cease to exist. There seems to be some primordial, undifferentiated Isness that could honestly care less if I existed or not. In this state the personal, individual life is seen as the inconsequential thing that it is. In this state life is absolutely not about me, and absolutely does not have an absolute plan for future human development. Having said that, this state is still "blissful", and I really find I don't fear my own cessation in this state, for in this undifferentiated state I am in many ways "One" with everything. 

In my life I have seen many a human die, and have as yet never sensed that any aspect of the individual being supersedes it's death and decay. Empirically, there is absolutely no reason to believe that any of us escapes the permanent individual cessation that death imposes. Emotionally and psychologically there are a thousand reasons for us to believe that death does not equal permanent individual cessation. And so, I will always question why anyone who experiences the Void (aka the causal state) would believe it allows your individual consciousness to exist forever. And then I remember the fear of cessation that all humans feel, and it all makes sense. Fear is the most powerful force driving human thought, and human metaphysical beliefs.

And with that said, I would much rather be John Doe than to be enlightened. Because if we were really enlightened, we might not like what we find.

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When you are asleep the world appears dimly like a dream. Wake up, then, and see the world as it is.

Ah, what a great pointing, to a state where there is no fear of cessation.

Once we taste this, we solve 1,001 problems that are tied to clinging and contracting.

Thanks for bringing up a sober view on dead humans.

I was goofing around on the Nikon Universcale yesterday. A nifty package that helps show us physical perspectives.

http://www.nikon.com/about/feelnikon/universcale/index.htm

Somewhere I came across a comment along the lines of "the known macro-world and the known micro-world are amazingly similar in terms of the degree of size variation they have from us."

Which basically means - if we look really far and really near, we can see the same extent .. and no more.

So, the known universe is really indistinguishable from the scales we take as givens based on the capacities of our eyeballs and brains.

So ... when that brain and those eyeballs are no longer connected to consciousness, what will that consciousness have to hold onto?

In fact, I truly wonder if we can ever escape the defining pecularities of our sensory based way of knowing and scaling things.

People can say "yes, there are ways to get insights into what is beyond the body," but I have to ask "can you show me a being without a body that has ever had such an insight?"

It is like a school of fish speculating about mountain climbing.

People can say "yes, there are ways to get insights into what is beyond the body," but I have to ask "can you show me a being without a body that has ever had such an insight?"

I think there is something quite important contained within this statement. States, whether we are experiencing them or conceptualizing them, are always embodied…at least as far as any of us know. Any other claim to the contrary is a metaphysical belief. So if we start extrapolating from our experience of something that might be called a subtle state, and imagine that this state could be disembodied and survive our own personal death…well then, I would say you are a great metaphysician, or a person afraid to confront your own death. To claim that the subtle state and the causal state in some way have their own bodies is a speculative dream, and I wonder why we would feel the need to posit such a body distinct from our lived experience of our physical body.

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When you are asleep the world appears dimly like a dream. Wake up, then, and see the world as it is.

Isn't your body electrical? Well maybe we use the idea of the subtle body to express the electrical nature of the body. And radically seperating the physical, subtle and causal is not an Integral perspective. The physical, subtle and causal are present always. When someone talks about a state of causal the process can be left out. We clear the physical and subtle to just end up at causal not as seperate state but the equalibrium of state is such that causal is experienced but that would put us in the subtle and physical. So can we see that it is always the three physical, subtle, and causual, and depending on the state we have the state of each physical, subtle, and causal. Dialectics does not work for having a whole/part in a three tiered manifestation and triple domain manifestation. See if my post on trialectics brings some insight.

Hi Schalk,

Pardon me for being a little late in entering this conversation.

It just may be that there are valid reasons why there are no gushing comments here about  experiences in the causal state.  Allow me to suggest that there's a category error at work here, based i suppose on a likely enough assumption, i.e. that the causal state is a magnitude  higher than the subtle or two magnitudes  greater than the gross.  And as much as i'd be happy to approach this question directly, it may be more fruitful to approach it obliquely  through one of my favorite means;  analogy.

In the gross realm if i choose to examine something very distant i'd  probably opt for a telescope, or if this something to be examined is minute, i like Van Leeuwenhoek would probably opt for a microscope.  But it would be a category error in either case for me to expect either instrument to be capable of describing what passed through it.

This is not to suggest that the causal state is a vehicle of some sort of transmission, but in its truest form (Nirguna Brahman) underlies all objects, in the same way that KW suggests that a mirror 'underlies' equally all its objects.

It happens that i'm a student and advocate of the school  that holds that truth cannot be borrowed.  So if i had to speak to this subject from  my own experience i would first go back to the moment of my awakening.  I had  been working on what amounts to a koan for 12 years, repeating the same question over and over again.  And indeed if you and i had  met in those days hardly 5 minutes would have  passed until i would have  posed the question directly to you.  In any case in the presence of my teacher  i entered directly into a  subtle realm.  I was quite surprised to find it populated by subtle beings.  They were not visible to me, but  we were in instant telepathic rapport.  The most prominent initial quality that i  found in them was their sense of humor!  Entering into this circle of beings  i had the distinct sense that it was as if they were smiling and nudging each other saying look who's arrived here.  I mention this only to underscore the following, it was  then telepathically transmitted to me using what i would describe as words of great precision, "Beyond this point you will not remember. . ."

It may be worth pointing out that this was not just a temporary state experience, but left me  irrevocably changed .  Returning to the gross body, i was not at all confident that it could still function in it.  So i excused myself and went to the bathroom figuring that if i could still piss and shit that i would  probably  be okay.  Among the lasting residue of this experience of long ago is a problem i have with simple location; if  major streets  are parallel to each other i am forced to be very careful not to mix or confuse the two.  It took me a long while to figure this out but what finally i came to conclude was  from that moment forward i would always have one foot in the visible world and one in the invisible, and to be cautious in their distinction.

Other 'excursions', if that's the right word, into the causal realm similarly defy fulsome description, even as does deep dreamless sleep,

Warmly,

Charles

41N58'02" 88W18'28"

 

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