[MD] The Trouble With Wilber

[David M]

> dmb says:
> In Wilber's conception "Spirit" is detectable and natural.

DM: I genuinely enquire, now does he demonstrate this?

DMB: As Keith points out, this materialism gutts the
> interiors.

DM: How do interiors fit into the MOQ scheme described by Pirsig?


> dmb says:Wilber is interested in the more
> advanced forms of consciousness, ways of seeing that are a little more 
> rare
> but which are more or a continution of increasingly complex cognitive
> structures outlined by Piaget.

DM: How are complex cognitive structures described in MOQ terms?
How are advanced forms of consciousness created?



DMB:
> But I was surprized to learn that Piaget's work shed so much light on the
> subject-object distinction. Against Freud, Piaget argued that infants did
> not repress memories because of their dark or shameful (Oedipal) nature 
> but
> simply because they lacked the cognitive tools to form a memory. Lacan 
> later
> picked up on this work and re-interpreted Freud's Oedipal phase in terms 
> of
> Piaget's stages. The upshot of all this is that it explains how the infant
> moves from a psychologically undifferentiated state so that it does not 
> yet
> make any distinction between itself and the world. The young infant is One
> with mommy, so to speak. But then the father enters the scene to shatter
> their coziness. This is not to be taken literally, of course. The father
> here represents the intrusion of what Lacan calls "the symbolic order",
> which is basically the acquisition of language and the transmission of
> cultural values that go with it. This is when the infant begins to form a
> conception of itself as distinct from the world, from its mother. As
> Eagleton describes the point of agreement among them all, "at an early 
> point
> in the infant's development, no clear distinction between subject and
> object, itslef and the external world, is yet possible" (Literary Theory
> 182). Or as Pirsig puts it in Lila (opening of chapter 8), "The culture in
> which we live hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret 
> experience
> with, and the concept of the primacy of subjects and objects is built 
> right
> into these glasses".

DM: I agree that this stuff is useful to expand our understanding of the 
MOQ.

> Its interesting that the infant lives in that unified state of 
> consciousness
> but of course babies are not mystics. One has to acquire an ego
> consciousness before it can be transcended. As Wilber would say, confusing
> pre-rational babies with trans-rational mystics is a pre/trans fallacy

DM: I agree that you need to go on this journey to overcome dualism,
but have eastern mystics really experienced the full extent of dualism 
created
in the west?

>
> "The term mystic is sometimes confused with "occult" or "supernatural" and
> with magic and witchcraft but in philosophy it has a different meaning. 
> Some
> of the most honored philosophers in history have been mystics: Plotinus,
> Swedenborg, Loyola, Shankaracharya and many others. They share a common
> belief that the fundamental nature of reality is outside language; that
> language splits things up into parts while the true nature of reality is
> undivided." (keith quoted Lila)

DM: But to transcend dualism do we not need to be able to embrace an
understanding of language that only divides a reality that is ultimately 
one. And what
is so difficult about that?