from kenwilber.com:

Guest Blog: Does Involution Have a Telos? (Joe Perez)
May 12, 2007 16:29

in this blog joe perez presents his prose poem 'trinity'. very difficult to comprehend, if you're anything like me--but inspiring nonetheless. he promises he will be fleshing it out, and in the meantime we can always search for clues in his recently published book 'soulfully gay', which has an awesome foreward by KW (posted, i believe at kenwilber.com, but i can no longer locate it).

i was already reading the book when i saw the blog. even though it was beyond my comprehension, and remains so, something inside me said 'yes!' i posted a comment, which found its way onto his website until.joe-perez.com. without really understanding what i was saying, just going on intuition, i opined that telos was not none, as most of us already know, nor is it one, i.e. what eros seeks, as i had been previously led to believe, but two: that of eros and that of agape.

upon further reflection, i decided it also is not two: what we're calling the telos of evolution (driven by eros) and the telos of involution (driven, i understood, by agape) are actually two aspects of telos, more or less as Emptiness and Form, or Freedom and Fullness, are aspects of Spirit, neither two nor one. furthermore, i felt this was already implicit in all that KW has been doing, and JP had taken the next step in making it explicit, spotting and objectivizing what had already been deeply felt (the former subject becoming the object of the present subject).

afterall, isn't eros what drives transcendence? and agape, what drives inclusion? transcendence and inclusion being the two sides of the coin that, on a kosmic scale, is evolution, and on the scale of individual, sentient beings, development or transformation.

i believe so, although i could easily be very confused here. the problem, it seems to me, is that KW generally associates evolution with eros, and not with agape. but, at the same time,
isn't he repeatedly saying that eros is behind transcendence, and agape is behind inclusion? and that healthy transformation requires both transcendence and inclusion, i.e. eros and agape?

i think JP is really onto something here. i'm just uncomfortable with his choice of terms: evolution and involution. i would rather go, for the moment, with eros and agape, which, as i see it, are the driving forces of (the impetus for) evolution, neither of which i'm able myself to relate to involution.

KW generally only mentions eros, and omits agape, i'm guessing, because present conventional wisdom, oriented by conventional science, has enough trouble with one metaphysical notion, let alone two. they would much rather believe that there is none, and that it is all a matter of chance.

however it's clear from an integral perspective that both are needed: too much eros and not enough agape and you get repression, the work of phobos; too much agape and not enough eros and you get fixation, the work of thanatos. and wouldn't lila's play get kind of boring if all we had was eros to play with, and not also agape and their two counterparts?

as another kblog by michael garfield suggests, i believe, we're not just talking idle metaphysics here. from a scientific point of view, we can think of eros and agape as hypothetical notions we introduce in order to talk about evolution, for example. to the degree they enable us to posit a falsifiable theory that holds up under examination by turquoise altitude exemplars, for example, those included in aqal, aren't we justified in giving them and the related theory a higher degree of importance than orange altitude, metaphysical notions such as gravity and force, as expounded in newton's physics, backed only by zone 6 exemplars?

more later, but don't wait to jump in,

ralph

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the term 'volution' is my little bid for fame. if JP's claim that involution has a telos is accepted, and i'm inclined to agree, along with the telos that KW and others have for a long time claimed evolution has, then we get a telos of something incorporating both evolution and involution as its dualistic aspects, and, logically, it should be called simply volution, a movement that can be both outward (e-) and inward (in-).

like eros and agape, which together drive evolution, evolution and involution don't just go back and forth, but together go somewhere neither one on its own could manage. it's a little like breathing out (e-) and breathing in (in-). we might be all for breathing out: for evolution, development and greater consciousness. but if we don't at least occasionally breathe in, allow a little forgetting to take place, we're going to end up asphyxiated.

and involution is typically likened to forgetting. JP uses this word to interpret part of what is going on in the last 19 pages of 'soulfully gay'. just as breathing out serves an important function: we thereby rid ourselves of something we no longer need, e.g. CO2 laden air, breathing in refreshes us with new possibilities.

this not only occurs on the moment-to-moment micro-scale, but on all larger scales as well. there is the daily rhythm of wakeful activity and sleeping. there are larger rhythms of various sorts at work in our lives, so many it would be difficult to sort them out.
for example, getting 'involved' in what KW is doing, that initial deep breathing in, can lead to an incredible evolution of breathing out, broken perhaps by occasional in-breaths.

each of our lives can be thought of as one big breathing out, our own development through life constituting one more step for humankind, and leaving behind a gross body that has served its purpose and needs to be exhaled. however we conceive of reincarnation, isn't the intermediate period a refreshing take of a new breath, in preparation for a new life that will go beyond the previous one?

then there's the biggest breath we can conceive of, the enormous intake that gave us the Big Bang--talk about being refreshed!, followed by the kosmos that we find ourselves in.

again, i believe this is implicit in KW's writings. at least that's my interpretation, enlivened by what JP's said, of them. it will be interesting to see what he has to say, as well as JP, for that matter.

KW has acknowledged david deida's terms for Emptiness and Form, namely Freedom and Fullness, as being, perhaps, more suggestive of what we would want Enlightenment to include, Freedom being the realization of a oneness with all possible states, and Fullness the realization of oneness with all possible structures at any given time. however, this still leaves something out: we want not only states and structure-stages, but also the 3rd 's': shadow-owning, and to designate the oneness this can give us in the finite realm, he goes beyond Fullness to Wholeness.

i don't yet understand this well enough to attempt any explanation--i'm going to need to spend a few years or so studying that new book coming out, maybe, next year, called ToC, but the work to achieve Wholeness seems to me to require
involution as well as evolution on the individual level. there is, for example, regression in the service of the ego, and regression is another word for involution, i believe.

if we think of the kosmos as this game lila is playing, then involution allows us to say "stop! i don't like where this game is going. i want to go back to such and such a point, where things took a turn for the worse, and replay the game from that point." of course, lila doesn't simply forget everything that happened after that point. she, in effect, takes a new breath of fresh air, and plays with a new vigor and enthusiam, doesn't it seem? just as we wake up fresh in the morning and ready, if we've slept well, for a new day, a new man, a new woman....

after SES, KW was describing evolution (and development and transformation) for awhile not just as transcendence and inclusion, but also as differentiation and integration. he doesn't seem to use those latter terms much anymore, which intrigues me. whereas transcendence and inclusion seem like apt terms for what eros and agape are working for, differentiation and integration seem to me more like what involution and evolution look like close up. in integration, as with transcendence and inclusion, 'the many is made one': we get evolution, but in differentiation, the one is made many: we get involution. together we get volution. volution leads to greater consciousness, greater complexity, but in a more 'involved' way than evolution, which, of course, is a necessary, but not sufficient, part in itself.

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if eros and agape are driving transcendence and inclusion, and, therefore, evolution, what is driving involution? having grown up in a christian tradition, i'm going to guess forgiveness. to help wash away the karma and sins that inevitably come with evolution, we need the divine forgiveness of involution.

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we can think of the move from orange to green as, in part, a differentiation of orange's universalism to get green's pluralistic diversity, which is then integrated in moving on to 2nd tier to get unity in diversity. that part of the first move can be thought of as an involution, its continuation in the second move as evolution, in very general terms. if we think of these as two tools available to us in volution's drive towards greater consciousness, then clearly the healthiest approach would be to make use of both as appropriate.

this is just another example of KW's inclusionary philosophy that 'everybody is right': in this case, eros, agape and what i'm tentatively calling forgiveness, the three aspects of volutionary Love.

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wow! i seem to have this whole thread to myself, although it's something like what shakespeare might have felt, when he imagined having a jail cell all to himself. won't you help me escape this cell?

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Hi, Ralph,

I was just skimming the forums this morning before going to work and came across your thread.  Reading your posts, I wondered if you were familiar with Wilber's discussion of "involutionary givens."  He describes his ideas in Note 26 to Excerpt G.  I'm about to be late for work, so I will have to come back to this thread later, but I thought I'd post his comments on involutionary givens here in case you haven't read them yet:

~*~

"On the Nature of Involutionary Givens

      Are there any givens (other than past inheritances) that determine the nature of this moment's coming-to-be? Put differently, are there any givens that seem to have existed prior to the Big Bang? Among the few theorists who have thought clearly about this issue, the consensus seems to be yes.

      Here is a myth that is sometimes useful in suggesting notions that cannot be grasped dualistically or conceptually in any event: As Spirit throws itself outward (that's called involution) to create this particular universe with this particular Big Bang, it leaves traces or echoes of its Kosmic exhalation. These traces constitute little in the way of actual contents or forms or entities or levels, but rather a vast morphogenetic field that exerts a gentle pull (or Agape) toward higher, wider, deeper occasions, a pull that shows up in manifest or actual occasions as the Eros in the agency of all holons. (We can think of this "pull" as the pull of all things back to Spirit; Whitehead called it "love" as "the gentle persuasion of God" toward unity; this love reaching down from the higher to the lower is called Agape, and when reaching up from the lower to the higher is called Eros: two sides of the same pull). This vast morphogenetic pull connects the potentials of the lowest holons (materially asleep) with the potentials of the highest (spiritually awakened). The involutionary given of this morphogenetic field is a gradient of potentials, not actuals, so that Agape works throughout the universe as a love of gentle persuasion, pulling the lower manifest forms of spirit toward higher manifest forms of spirit--a potential gradient that humans, once they emerged, would often conceptualize as matter to body to mind to soul to spirit. "Spirit" (capital "S"), of course, was (and is) the ever-present ground of all of those manifest waves, equally and fully present in each, but "spirit" (small "s") is also a general stage or wave of evolution: spirit is the transpersonal stage(s) at which Spirit as ground can be permanently realized.

      The residue of this involutionary outpouring are various involutionary givens (or items that are given or deposited by involution, items that therefore pre-existed the big Bang and thus are already operating from the moment of the Big Bang forward), the most general of which is the great morphic field of evolutionary potential, a gentle gradient of persuasion pulling all manifest holons back to their ever-present Ground as Spirit--a Kosmic field of Agape, gently pulling evolution into greater and greater consciousness, embrace, inclusion. The universe, it appears, is tilted, and its entire contents are slowly sliding into the Source and Suchness of the entire display. This tilt, this grain to the Kosmos, this Agape, this vast morphogenetic potential, exerts a tender pull on evolution to unfold in waves of greater complexity, greater inclusiveness, greater depth, until the entire Kosmos is included in a prehensive unification that can swallow the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, hold Mount Everest in the palm of its hand, blink and bring nightfall to the entire universe, smile and bring forth the sun to shine on all creatures great and small.

      Are there involutionary givens other than the great Kosmic morphic field of Agape (appearing in all holons as Eros)? In other words, are there any a priori forms, not just in the evolutionary sequence, but in the involutionary sequence? We already saw that evolution inherits its previous moment as an a priori given. But those are not archetypal or timelessly pregiven forms, merely the past creative forms of evolutionary unfolding. We are now asking: are there any forms that were laid down as "memory" in the involutionary sequence and which therefore show up as timelessly given forms that are present at the very start of evolution itself and operative at every point of evolution's unfolding? As involutionary givens, we have already postulated Eros/Agape and the morphogenetic tilt of manifestation. Are there any others? (That is, are there any a priori forms that are a priori to evolution's a priori forms?)

      Whitehead believed so: eternal objects, for example (these are things that you have to have before you can have anything else, such as shape, color, etc.).

     Sheldrake implicitly has a set of involutionary givens. For Sheldrake, there are no archetypal constants or pregiven forms, but in fact he introduces several universal, pregiven constants in order to explain morphic resonance and its formative causation. By Sheldrake's own theory, there are certain categories that must always be the case in order for this theory of morphic resonance and formative causation to be true, and those a priori categories are in fact timeless (or archetypal in that sense). For example, Sheldrake sees the world as composed of energy and form; he sees energy causing energy and form causing form; he sees development occurring; and he sees creativity as essential. All of those--energy, form, causation, development, creativity--are seen to be present everywhere, timelessly, from the start--they do not themselves develop or evolve. They are therefore archetypal by his own standards, at least for this universe.

     Most physicists today believe that when the Big Gang occurred, it seemed to be following certain physical laws described by mathematics. These mathematical matrices therefore must have been present at or before the Big Bang (i.e., as involutionary givens), and not something that came into being after the Big Bang and were then inherited by the future (which would be an evolutionary a priori for subsequent moments, and which do indeed exist; but these mathematical forms appear to be involutionary a priori--not anything created in the past but present all along).

     All of these involutionary givens might be viewed as the patterns and constraints that are the residue of this particular round of involutionary creation: what's left of Spirit's exhalation that resulted in the Big Bang, which was therefore already following these patterns (or involutionary givens) when it arrived on the scene.

     So it certainly seems that there are at least some forms of involutionary givens. I would call these "archetypes," but that term has been so abused as to be perfectly meaningless. So let's call them "prototypes," or simply involutionary givens.

      On the other hand, many theorists, such as Plotinus, Hegel, and Aurobindo, went a bit too far in trying to specify and determine the form and sometimes content of these involutionary givens. They tended to view these involutionary givens as consisting of actual levels, sometimes with actual contents, so that evolution is nothing much more than a rewinding of the involution videotape.

      That view, I believe, does not easily withstand today's scrutiny. In fact, all of those great pioneers were presenting metaphysical, premodern (and certainly pre-postmodern) constructions. As such, they did not adequately grasp the AQAL nature of manifest spacetime; in particular, they did not grasp the formative power of the Lower-Left quadrant: the inescapably constitutive power of the cultural contexts and backgrounds with which all subjects and objects are indelibly meshed, to which they must initially conform, and within which certain of their prehensions necessarily arise. Put bluntly, even the staggering genius of these great pioneers could not escape their own cultural embeddedness enough to see that much of what they called "universal pregiven levels of being" were actually particular, socially constructed surface features. That is, most of what they ascribed to involutionary givens were really evolutionary inheritances. Not forms eternally given by Spirit on its way to material manifestation, but inherited forms of past manifestation on its return to Spirit. This is why we are attempting to construct a post-metaphysical, post-postmodern spirituality that honors the essentials of these masters, while setting them in a context more adequate to today's self-understanding (i.e., the form of Spirit's self-prehension at this particular wave of its own playful unfolding).

      Still, these blindingly brilliant, philosophical avatars of Eros saw one, overwhelming, awe-inducing fact: Spirit is your own Original Face. It is not something that is socially constructed, or that is created for the first time when you happen to stumble on it, or that pops out at the end of a temporal sequence, or that is nothing but some sort of Omega that can only be realized at the end of the universe. Spirit is your own ever-present, radically all-inclusive, always-already-the-case reality, which is why some notion of involution, or return to a Spirit that was never lost, is an inescapable part of the theoria of every great philosopher-sage, bar none. There is one, staggering, screamingly undeniable involutionary given: the ever-present Ground of all grounds, Nature of all natures, Condition of all conditions.

     Beyond that, the great philosopher-sages (premodern, modern, and postmodern) often disagree on the specifics of the other involutionary givens. Honorable men and women can do so. I have stated my own beliefs in this regard (and will summarize them below). But the notion of involutionary givens is a necessary framework with which the human mind, itself a product of evolution, must use in order to construe evolution in a noncontradictory way. As we saw, even the postmodernists, who deny any givens, actually present their own set of implicit givens to explain why there are no other givens.

     Well, all of these theorists, it seems, are intuiting those faint traces and perfumed residues of Spirit's quiet exhalation--your own original breathing out--that created this particular manifest world and thus show up as involutionary givens, there to be interpreted by the AQAL matrix of this and every moment.

      As I said, this is a useful myth.

      * * * *

     Within that myth, we can summarize. The postulated list of involutionary givens seems to include:

     (1) Eros. Eros basically is derived from one fact: Spirit creates the entire manifest world and every holon in it; in fact, every holon is Spirit-in-itself playing at being Other (e.g., the great nest of morphogenetic potential often summarized as matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit is actually Spirit-as-matter, Spirit-as-body, Spirit-as-mind, Spirit-as-soul, and Spirit-as-spirit). Since the reality, suchness, or isness of every holon is actually Spirit, but because most holons do not realize that they are Spirit, then each holon, so to speak, has an itch for infinity: each holon has a drive, a desire, a push, a telos, a hankering for God--which means, a drive to realize Spirit-itself, a drive which ultimately wants to embrace the entire Kosmos itself. This is a drive toward higher unions, wider identities, greater inclusion--culminating in God-realization, or every holon's realization of Spirit, by Spirit, in Spirit, as Spirit. This ultimate realization, however, is not a summation at the end of the line, or a culmination of temporal additions, or a finite sum of finite parts adding up to One Really Big Finite Thing, but rather the realization of the ever-present, spaceless and therefore infinite, timeless and therefore eternal, formless and therefore omnipresent, Condition of all conditions and Nature of all natures and radically groundless Ground of all grounds. Nevertheless, in the manifest realm, the paradoxical result is a drive toward greater unity among finite things themselves, yearning to be Free and Full. This drive toward greater unity and wholeness in the finite realm is called Eros: the drive of all finite things to find the infinite, which results in the increasing unification and differentiation-integration of finite occasions. In the temporal realm, the sequence of ever-increasing unifications is endless, stretching from the subtle into millions, billions, zillions of manifest realities in the future, as every moment transcends-and-includes its predecessors, thus bringing new truths, new experiences, new realities, and new integrations into being, with no discernible upward limit (because Spirit is not found as the upper limit of finite things but as their ever-present Ground, and therefore there is no final destination upward). At some point in this spiral of development and evolution, a holon becomes complex enough, differentiated-and-integrated enough, conscious enough, that it can begin to awaken to its ever-present Ground, even as the finite display continues on its agitated round of unifications. In that holon, Spirit then continues its play of manifestation, but now as a conscious, felt, vividly present Presence, a ray of infinity hooking out from that holon on the world that it created.

     This drive--the drive of Eros--appears, to the third-person perspective of humans at or beyond the yellow wave, as a drive toward self-organization in all complex holons, a drive to create order out of chaos, a series of dissipative structures that eat energy and create unified form: against all scientific sensibilities (which see only "its" without intentionalities), and against every known law of physics (which imagines that "its" only run downhill), the material universe appears to be actively organizing itself into higher and more complex systems. Scientists scratch their heads. How can that be? The universe is self-winding. The universe seeks higher unions. The universe has a drive for self-organization. The universe... well, let us say plainly what the it-perspective misses: the universe is on fire with an unquenchable thirst for God. But however you wish to conceive this Eros, this drive to order-out-of-chaos, this astonishing autopoiesis at the very heart of matter, it is an uncontested pattern in evolution, and a pattern that cannot be accounted for by evolution itself.

     Thus, Eros is postulated to be one of the involutionary givens: that is, one of the items present from the start of evolution, a deposit in the manifest realm of Spirit's involution into, and as, that realm--faint echoes of Spirit's sneeze that set this particular round of the Kosmic Game in motion.

     (2) If all holons reach toward Spirit, Spirit reaches out to all holons. The first is called Eros, the second is called Agape. Two sides of the same pull.

     (3) A morphogenetic gradient in the manifest realm. This refers to the curvature of spacetime across all possible forms of the manifest or AQAL matrix: Eros operates through a gradient of increasing embrace. This gradient (clumsily expressed by premodern traditions as a pregiven, fixed series of levels and planes stretching from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit--the so-called "great chain of being") actually represents the tilt of a universe looking for God. Involution creates, not a series of fixed planes and pregiven levels (there is no pregiven great chain), but a vast morphogenetic field of potentials, defined not by their fixed contents and forms but by their relative placement in the sliding field. (See "On the Nature of a Post-metaphysical Spirituality," posted on this site.)

     (4) Certain Prototypical Forms or Patterns. If involution creates, not a series of pregiven fixed levels but a fluid morphogenetic field, the question remains: are there any fixed forms that are involutionary givens? We saw several: Whitehead's eternal objects, basic mathematical-physical laws, Sheldrake's implicitly postulated archetypes, and so on. A list of 20 proposed involutionary givens can be found in chapter 2 of SES. These 20 tenets are simply the residual forms of the Big Sleep, echoes of the Big Forgetting that set this round in motion, involutionary forms that were tattooed on the translucent skin of the radiant Kosmos in its coming-to-be.

     But aside from those relatively few involutionary givens, keep in mind that what most theorists postulate to be involutionary givens or eternal archetypes (i.e., involutionary a priori, given for all time) are actually evolutionary a priori, or forms chaotically created in temporal unfolding and then handed to the future, not as forms that were predetermined even before they unfolded, but simply as Kosmic habits that various forms happened to take in their AQAL evolution, forms that were then handed as a priori to the next moment, an a priori determined not by eternal archetypes but by temporal history.

     Still, the point is that at least some patterns appear not to be merely historical--and that is where it is necessary to postulate involutionary givens. Of course, the theorists who do acknowledge involutionary givens, such as Whitehead, must then postulate that the actual emergence of a given occasion is somehow a mixture of involutionary givens, or timeless a priori, and evolutionarily-created or historical a priori, which are not determined prior to their emergence. For example, the early subatomic particles at the Big Bang were obeying various laws of physics, so their actual existence was a mysterious mesh of archetypal givens and historical contingencies. Some version of this mixture or concrescence of eternal objects and actual occasions is postulated by most philosophers who have thought carefully about issues of involution and evolution, and I accept the general outlines of these conclusions.

     But two points: be as careful as you can that you are not confusing evolutionary givens--which are not eternally given but are created by temporal, chaotic, evolutionary history and bequeathed to the future as habits that are then givens or a priori in a temporal sense--and involutionary givens, which are what you must have before you can have anything else, and which therefore appear to be exist at or before the Big Bang." (Wilber, Excerpt G)

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May the boundless knowledge that time presents and space allows illuminate the native perspectives of your original face.

hi balder,

glad to hear from someone.  my thoughts for this thread are speculative, to say the least.  we don't yet actually know what either JP or KW will have to say about this.  certainly KW has looked into this much more extensively than JP or myself, but isn't it possible that JP has managed to climb onto KW's expansive shoulders and have looked farther in this particular direction.  KW often provides little insights in his many podcast conversations into what's recently happened but not yet made it into book form.  of late i think he has mentioned at least a couple of times that a spiritual teacher hasn't succeeded (or something like that) if he hasn't had at least one student who went beyond him

how could i have not read excerpt G at least a couple of times?  in my speculations i'm interpreting involutionary givens to have been picked up in the big involutionary in-breath that gave us the big-bang.  this allows for the possibility that there could be another big-bang with yet more voluted involutionary givens. in other words, involutionary givens are not eternal, from this perspective.

if my speculations seem too wild, i guess we'll just have to wait and see what KW and JP have to say..

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how i got started on this, from until.joe-perez.com:

Friday, May 18, 2007

Two more responses to the "Trinity" poem. Don on the SeattleIntegral email list writes:

Joe, I've always been a little uncomfortable with the involution part of KW's integral theory since it is something that is inferred rather than observed. Note that in places he has said that involution did not happen in time. I guess I'm unclear how that could be. Also I would be happier if the theory were, at least in part, falsible, i.e. if it made predictions about things not yet known, which could then be tested and, if the experiment did not turn out as predicted, which would negate the theory. (Of course the idea of "falsibility" is not itself falsible, so that concept is a basic assumption, albeit one that pertains to everything within science.)
To which ralph opines:

don, read 'soulfully gay'. it'll give you a lot better idea, not only where he's coming from, but what he is attempting to do with this addition to aqal. ralph
Ralph continues in another email to the list:

i wasn't going to say anymore because i haven't yet digested it myself, but how can one remain silent at the dawning of a new day, even if one has little idea what it may bring? wilber has described--i can't remember where--telos as a certain tilt to the kosmos, also called eros, pulling us towards Unity, to use a term of joe's. i've always felt uncomfortable about this because it seems to reduce our role in this kosmic play to wisely surrendering to this tilt, or foolishly resisting it. and i'm constantly having to ask myself 'why am i being so foolish?' after all, i know what the wise thing to do is. why do i have to be so perverse? having glimpsed joe's answer, my first reaction is 'of course! what he's explicitly pointing out to us has been there all along in what ken has been saying and doing, but only implicitly.

i'm reminded of fred kofman's going to wilber with a question about the twently tenets of SES. he was troubled by 'thanatos' being posited as the complement to 'eros'. why not 'agape'? excellent question, because, in fact, 'agape' does seem to me to play the role of the primary complement to 'eros' in SES. wilber just failed to make this explicit. same thing here, i believe.

both the guru and the pandit talk about a duty, a responsibility they have in regard to the evolution of the kosmos, i.e. to the workings of eros. but they are motivated, in carrying out this duty, in reaching out to all of us, by agape. there does indeed seem to be a telos at work here, and joe has explicitly identified it.

this is really huge. it means we are pulled, not by none, not by one, but by two teli (or whatever the plural of telos is). the integral approach is, of course, to include both in our reckoning. this is definitely a much more interesting kosmic play than heretofore imagined. and, as wilber indicates in the latest chapter from the terrorist trilogy, the negative complements, 'thanatos' and 'phobos', of 'eros'and 'agape' also need to be taken into account. our view of the play is only getting more interesting, more inclusive of what was already going on, anyway.

from JP:

Here's a dictionary that says the plural of telos is teloi, so I'm going with it.

"Trinity" is offered not as a falsifiable theory, but as a prose poem. It is an invitation to imagination and exploration and wonder. If you feel comfortable doing so, write about it. Create a responsive poem. Create a falsifiable theory of it, or explore what a falsibiable theory might look like. As the poet, I cannot offer any one definitive interpretation. The poem's meaning is multifaceted, and includes the response of the community of readers.
I will say, however, that Ralph is correct that there is a connection between the twin teloi of Spirit--involution and evolution--and the explorations in my book, Soulfully Gay. I won't say any more at this time so as not to spoil any plot points, but I will note that in my opinion the last 19 pages of the book begin to spell out what involution looks like. And yes, like Wilber, I would concur that involution cannot really be perceived within the continuum of time. That part's in the book, too.

Unfortunately, I am not able to provide a falsifiable injunction for involution such as "Step 1. Step outside of space and time. Step 2. Look about you." It just wouldn't be wise to do so, even if I thought it was that simple. Instead, I have offered my book as an account of my own experiences, and those who read the book and are comfortable drawing parallels to their own experience can begin asking some fruitful questions and, perhaps, imagining what the proper set of injunctions might be to falsify the notion that involution has a telos, if such a thing is imaginable.

One possible set of injunctions for confirming the truth of "Trinity" leaps to mind immediately! "Step 1. Be born as Joe Perez in September, 1969. Step 2. Write a journal called 'Soulfully Gay' in 2003 and 2004. Step 3. Have the experiences resulting in "Trinity" in 2004 and describe them as they happened. Step 4. Send the manuscript of your journal to Ken Wilber." etc., etc. LOL.

Warning: asking "How can I falsify a theory of involution?" is a difficult inquiry. The answers to such a question might be as troublesome, and the explorations as uncomfortable, as attempting to answer such a hypothetical question as, "Why would God send his only begotten son to be crucified on a Cross? How can I prove that such an act was necessary or unnecessary?" We are really treading into the realm of the great stories and great symbols and mysteries here.

posted by Joe Perez at 12:49 PM

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from excerpt G:

As Spirit throws itself outward (that's called involution) to create this particular universe with this particular Big Bang, it leaves traces or echoes of its Kosmic exhalation. These traces constitute little in the way of actual contents or forms or entities or levels, but rather a vast morphogenetic field that exerts a gentle pull (or Agape) toward higher, wider, deeper occasions, a pull that shows up in manifest or actual occasions as the Eros in the agency of all holons. (We can think of this "pull" as the pull of all things back to Spirit; Whitehead called it "love" as "the gentle persuasion of God" toward unity; this love reaching down from the higher to the lower is called Agape, and when reaching up from the lower to the higher is called Eros: two sides of the same pull). This vast morphogenetic pull connects the potentials of the lowest holons (materially asleep) with the potentials of the highest (spiritually awakened). The involutionary given of this morphogenetic field is a gradient of potentials, not actuals, so that Agape works throughout the universe as a love of gentle persuasion, pulling the lower manifest forms of spirit toward higher manifest forms of spirit--a potential gradient that humans, once they emerged, would often conceptualize as matter to body to mind to soul to spirit. "Spirit" (capital "S"), of course, was (and is) the ever-present ground of all of those manifest waves, equally and fully present in each, but "spirit" (small "s") is also a general stage or wave of evolution: spirit is the transpersonal stage(s) at which Spirit as ground can be permanently realized.

      The residue of this involutionary outpouring are various involutionary givens

  it looks like three perspectives are 'involved' here, which in terms of Spirit, are its three faces.  there is I-I throwing myself outward to create this particular universe with THIS PARTICULAR big bang, and then proceeding to pull myself back together to, i would guess, neither what I already always was nor what i've newly become, i.e. beyond words, not infinite, not finite, blah blah blah: the first person perspective for Spirit.  this pull involves eros, agape and forgiveness.

there is i opposite the second face of Spirit, myself as the finite manifest kosmos, opposite the infinite, with a second person perspective of Spirit.  what I-I sees as a throwing out, i see as a breathing in, a movement of forgiveness (wish i could come up with a more comprehensive word:  forgiveness only points at an aspect of what i'm trying to get at).  what, then, from the perspective of I-I is agape, is, for me, eros.  and, as manifest spirit, i'm also involved in forgiveness and agape.

the third perspective, which takes into account both the first and the second, is that taken by KW in the above quote, as well as myself on this thread.

 

 

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balder! i think you'd be ashamed getting so many points and not responding! one more attempt:

"But I should say I hold this integral theory very lightly. Part of the difficulty is that, at this early stage, all of our attempts at a more integral theory are very preliminary and sketchy. It will take decades of work among hundreds of scholars to truly flesh out an integral theory with any sort of compelling veracity. Until that time, what I try to offer are suggestions for making our existing theories and practices just a little more integral than they are now ...."

From Part I of "On the Nature of a Post-Metaphysical Spirituality: Response to Habermas", by Ken Wilber, posted at shambhala.com in 2002 and, later, at kenwilber.com, I believe.

When asked at the beginning of "Kosmic Consciousness" what he thought of himself as, e.g. a mapmaker?, his second or third, somewhat whimsical reply was: maybe a story teller. I actually liked that reply the best. I think he's been telling a damn good story.

An obvious sign of this was Fred Kofman's coming to him, pleading for an alteration in the story, and, more recently, Martin Beck Matustik and, now, Joe Perez announcing important additions they would like to make. This is clearly a story many of us would like to get in on--one that may well be worked and reworked into something that could serve humankind for some time to come.

the story he's telling, it's good to keep in mind, is not mythically or pre-rationally based. he calls it in the quote 'integral theory', which i feel is what everyone else wants to call it, and 'everybody is right', so he's going along with their wishes. but i don't think whatever metaphysics it's based on is even visible at a turquoise altitude. it's basic notions are all vision-logically falsifiable. that includes, for example, evolution, involution, eros, agape, phobos and thanatos. they can be examined by means of the eight methodologies, which is, broadly speaking, all that we have presently available. if they hold up, then they're as good as we can do with vision-logic. most likely they will be modified, perhaps added to or subtracted from and reorganized, just as he has been doing up till now.

i've enjoyed playing with JP's suggested additions, although not the christian theological part. first, i don't know enough about this. second, aqal is about deep structure, and this gets into surface structure, i feel.

that there is a dialectic of evolution and involution seems to me incontrovertible. how could they possibly not interact with each other? could there really be two spirits-in-action? of course not. to restrict ourselves to evolution only gives us a distorted picture of how Form is changing, of what is moving us each and every moment.

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i don't have vol.2 of the collected works, nor any other volumes, for that matter, but i've come across an interesting quote from 'personal odyssey', which is contained in that volume, on p.30 of 'embracing reality', by brad reynolds:

wilber's transpersonal view [phase 2] could also integrate both involution and evolution, for from his 'correct but partial' or integral perspective, he could reasonably conclude: 'those are perfectly compatible views and both are correct. the union of science and religion is the union of evolution and involution.'

the important thing here, i believe, is that he recognizes that evolution and involution are not separate, but aspects of a greater whole.

in talking about all this, especially as sketchily as i have, terminology presents a problem. i'm now realizing that my idea of introducing some new term that would include forgiveness was a bad idea, and i should have stuck with agape and its complement, eros, as KW does. the problem is that in his latest use of these terms, the third chapter of 'the many faces of terrorism' that he's offered us, agape is pictured as being horizontal in its movement (and eros, vertically upward). i picture the movement of agape as being vertically downward, as i think JP does, with horizontal movement involving both eros and agape, agency and communion. the problems with phobos and thanatos are not so much their direction as the splitting of the self they engender. at this point i don't understand why KW would want to associate agape specifically with translation, but i assume there is a reason.

why would we want both evolution and involution? among other reasons, we then get both unity, from integration, and diversity, from differentiation--the one and the many, wholeness and partness.

summary of terms:

transcendence and inclusion = eros and agape = evolution and involution = volution;
differentiation and integration = agape and eros = involution and evolution = volution.

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