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Mark Lee Robinson
Center for Creative Conflict Resolution

So I am trying to figure out what the difference is between a belief system and a cognitive map.  Those seem to be two ways of saying the same thing.  The critique seems to suggest that AQAL is a religion, which it is clearly is not.  But it certainly is a perspective.  Indeed, it is a perspective on perspectives.

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Mark Lee Robinson
Center for Creative Conflict Resolution

it's funny actually that some critics would call the aqal approach a belief system

isn't that like calling a map of north america (for example) a belief system ??

 

I suppose a map of North America could be considered a belief system.  It indicates what the map maker values and thus chooses to signify.  It is a framework from which to view the world.

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Mark Lee Robinson
Center for Creative Conflict Resolution

hi mark and fairyfaye,

the difficulty, i feel, is that aqal is truly something new. yes, there have been human creations in the past that are like it in various ways, but nothing, as well as i know, that even comes close to incorporating all there is to aqal. that nothing else can even compete with it is evident from the fact that, again, as well as i know anyway, the contenders that have been promoted are all easily interpreted by aqal, showing that, at best, they're subholons of aqal. a few examples, such as vajrayana from the east, and postmodernism from the west, are mentioned in this conversation. compared to aqal, they are obviously more superficial, less deep.

this is truly amazing. as you've indicated, mark, he was able to achieve a perspective on all these other perspectives. i can imagine others succeeding in arriving at a new perspective on some aspect of aqal, leading to minor improvements, but not on aqal as a whole, at least not for a good while. it's a little like the next ice age. i imagine it will happen, but not anytime soon, even though it could.

actually, wilber has talked about the sign of a good teacher (pandit) being that he has a student who succeeds in standing on his shoulders, so maybe he's not as pessimistic as i tend to be. but he's been available for several decades now, couldn't we say, and that student evidently hasn't yet shown up, so the likelihood seems to me not to be very great.

so, if there's to be any dramatic improvement in aqal anytime soon, i think it will have to come from wilber himself, with the help of others, of course. maybe that's why i'm so anxious to read 'overview' and 'superview'

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it appears that the aqal map will more likely continue to evolve than be flat out replaced with another map because it is already so all inclusive

are there really intellegent folks out there who actually argue with aqal ? now THAT's mindboggling

 

good point mark about maps and belief systems .. therefore we could say yes aqal is a belief system in the same way that a map of for example north america is a belief system

btw: interesting point that a map of north america or canada or manitoba or winnipeg could not show me sitting something flowing thru my fingertips as they tap away

 

 

but aqal points directly to it

 

Hi mark, ralph, and fariefaye,

I 'm just writing to say that this was a very, very good audio clip. Ken Wilber is obviously in bestform and I'm still digesting what Viddyuddeva said in the second half of the conversation. Especially when he raised the 'meta-concern' about the bogyman (about 6:30) and talked about the distortion that might be 'built-in' into desire (hope I understood it right). I guess he arrives from a buddhist viewpoint to these insights; I'm pretty sure the same thing can be expressed using postmodern terms. Accidentally, I am re-reading Slavoj Zizeks 'On belief' right now and I guess (?) he says pretty much the same thing in Lacanian psychoanalytic terms (it's at the second-last chapter of the book, page 171 german version). Ralph, you might remember that I mentioned this book before. Anyway it doesn't matter what we call the finger - as long as it points to the moon!

All in all, this conversation shows a Ken Wilber who provides a true synthesis of East and West, Modern and Postmodern issues. At this point, I do not see how Wilber can be criticized from the postmodern camp.
As you might have noticed, I don't care too much about belief systems.

witz :)

witz,

your message reminds me of a remark wilber made some time ago. unfortunately, about all i remember is the deep structure, so to speak, or at least my interpretation of the deep structure of his remark. i have no idea what dialogue it appeared in. i'm not even sure about the topic, although i think it was psychoanalysis, which your reference to lacan reminded me of. i guess it's best to stick to what i remember, so i'll give only the deep structure, as i remember it.

in the german room of a certain house someone goes to a window, looks out, and sees something apparently no one's seen before. he conveys his discovery, in german of course, to those also in the room. an animated conversation in german ensues.

one of those in the room is actually french, and he soon returns to the french room of the house to pass on this discovery, now in french of course, to his countrymen. a french conversation ensues.

an american, who has been following all of this as best he can, languages being less than a strong suit for americans, of course makes his way to the american room, where he reports as best he can what he has heard.

we do the best we can, don't we? if that's the case, though, the question arises of why didn't anyone else bother to go to a window and take a look for him/herself. even if the first german accurately interpreted and reported what he had seen, that initial insight was inevitably garbled as it got passed along.

passing onto the surface structure, i think the first german (actually, a german speaking austrian) was freud. wilber has also remarked that both freud and piaget were excellent phenomenologists. their practice was outstanding. their theories, the term commonly employed in science for belief systems, constructed to explain what their practices had revealved, were less so.

my impression is that lacan, while he also practiced psychoanalysis, was not a particularly good phenomenologist. he was more of a theorist, so he wasn't actually working with the best that freud had to give.

in america, we got an even more watered-down version of psychoanalysis, including the horrible mistranslation of Ich (I) and Es (it) by ego and id. apparently, no practitioner, i.e. phenomenologist, of freud's equal has yet appeared.

the bogeyman viddyuddeva talks about can be either the theorist or the practitioner. aqal is more about practice, about actually going to the window and looking out, imo, than theory, than just talking about what others have seen. so, why do i devote myself to integral theory and compromise on practice? good question!

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Hi ralph,

you make some good points in your reply. I never thought of theories as belief systems, but sure, you are right, that's what they would be called in the orange v/meme.

I like your 'house' metaphor, it's beautiful. In my eyes, the first german to really look out of the window was Hegel. In fact Wilber's approach reminds me of Hegel in many ways, for example in his claim of 'explaining everything'. But let's speak about psychoanalysis.

Your point about Lacan being more of a theorist than a phenomenologist sounds valuable. Unfortunately I couldn't get my hands on more than one or two of his 'seminars' - I think some of them are yet to be published. So I rely on Zizeks view on Lacan. Me too I remember Wilber say that Lacan did 'water down' Freud, as you seem to suggest in your house metaphor. But Lacan was a practitioner of psychoanalysis, too; I am somehow skeptic when you say Lacan didn't really get everything Freud had to offer. Is it not possible that Lacan went even further than Freud, adapting his teachings to postmodern times? But then, maybe I do not understand Freud the way Wilber seems to do, so I should study all this issue a little while longer. :)

I am writing this kind of spontanously. I'm looking forward to discussing things later on, when I thought about them more deeply.

best, witz

Not sure where to but this observation in but...

What I most appreciated about Ken's response to his critics was his claim about being attached only to truth.

What a powerful pointer that is!

To be totally attached to the truth is about remaining totally unattached to EVERYTHING else.

For Ken to demonstrate this kind of balance between big heart and big mind even while defending his critics, is an ambitious practice in deed.

I am inspired. :)


~Katie

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Awareness brings choice; choice brings freedom.

witz:

Is it not possible that Lacan went even further than Freud, adapting his teachings to postmodern times?

definitely! with regard to theory, that is. but freud was evidently a genius bar none in his ability to observe what was going on with the clients he worked with. he just had trouble theorizing about it, as i understand it, in part because of the mechanically oriented age he lived in and their screwy theories, which, it's all quadrants afterall, he had to coexist with.

also, i think your reference to hegel is particularly apt. that's at the root of my confused memories. i think wilber has talked about philosophy in a similar vein to what i recall about psychoanalysis. there was this incredible flowering of philosopher in germany (not actually a country, of course, at that time) in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which got somewhat lost in translation in making its way to france and, then, america. i'm hoping wilber can help to change that .

katie, i think your comment about truth is right on the money. i was just rereading some of issue 33 of WIE, and the same thing is said there. this is really a remarkable stand he is taking. i would say i identify pretty much with evolution, but that's not at all the same thing as identifying with truth. evolution, afterall, is at best a partial truth.

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ralph,

are you saying that Freud was a 'guru' and Lacan was a 'Pandit'? That's what I get from your answer. I'm not sure if I can figure out the difference very well. Can you help?

(Did I say Hegel was the first? Well there was Kant also. How could I ever forget this guy?)

best, witz

hi witz,

i think i see what you're getting at with the terms guru and pandit. the difficulty, to my mind, is that they have a decidedly spiritual connotation, and freud was pointedly atheist, as was lacan, i imagine. one of the problems in talking about things like this is the great difficulty there is in finding terms that faithfully portray what we mean.

i'm not simply relying on a couple of anecdotes of wilber's. there's a much larger context, but i don't understand it that well myself. for example, he talks about the three strands of knowledge, and the first is, metaphorically, going to the window and looking out, the second is reporting what you saw, and the third is, or should be, i believe, confirmation by the community of those who know how to do the first two, some of whom have done so.

by coincidence i read alot of early freud several decades ago. don't ask me why--i was a math ph.d. what i mean is it didn't help me at all in my career, but it was fascinating 'the interpretation of dreams' and several subsequent volumes of his collected works (in english). wilber's remarks reminded me of this. exactly as he indicated, i could remember that freud had done a truly exceptional job with the first strand, but not as good with the second. as is so often remarked on, wilber had reminded me of what i already knew, but hadn't realized i knew.

thinking about it now, i realize freud must have had alot of trouble with the second strand, a problem all true pioneers have, because there simply wasn't yet a community of experts in psychoanalysis. how could he explain what he had seen to a community devoted to some prior paradigm?

i stopped reading his collected works at some point because it only got worse as he continued wrapping what he had seen in more and more theory. i also tried reading lacan at some point, but he was no help. my guess is that he was much more interested in the second strand than the first.

the second strand is, of course, as important as the first. from an integral perspective, it's rediculous to have one without the other, or without the third, for that matter. this raises a question i'm grappling with about ILP. if we think of the first strand as practice, the second as theory as practiced individually, and the third as theory as practiced communally, then an ILP kit supplies the third, and the main thing for us to supply is the first and to a lesser extent, the second.

i want to practice the third as a career--forget about me being 65; times have changed and i could easily have another 20 working years, although not at the pace of younger workers. but from an integral perspective, that means not only working on the third, and the second, but also the first strand aspects of such career.

going back to a previous message of yours, wilber likes to quote c.s. peirce (pronounced 'purse', i've lately learned) for his definition of belief. as i vaguely remember it, it's what we're willing to put our money on. in this sense we all pretty much have beliefs, but some obviously are better than others.

wilber has also suggested there is a developmental line that goes from belief to faith to knowledge. again, it's hard to come up with terms that aren't easily confusing, but the implication here is that with faith there is more knowledge than with belief. at any rate, it's definitely better to put one's money on knowledge rather than belief. so scientific theories, considered as belief systems, are definitely better than fundamentalist beliefs.

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