![]() A more extensive revelation of his denialism is found in another discussion with Crichton, but it seems to be for members of his Integral Institute only and not easily accessible.Ī number of explanations come to mind for Wilber’s turn against science. “We don’t know if we’re getting all of the facts”, he tells his audience. You can listen here (from around 5 minutes in) to Wilber talk about “my friend Michael Crichton” including Wilber’s retelling of the conspiracy theory about scientists covering up evidence. Of course, State of Fear had leading deniers in the US Congress and the blogosphere cock-a-hoop. He retails a series of “facts” about climate change science that have been shown to be manifestly false and based on ignorance, but which the novelist deploys to support his thesis that climate science is used as a form of social control. So, what are we to think when we discover that Ken Wilber has swallowed the poison pill of climate science denial, and sings the praises of Michael Crichton? Crichton is notorious for his novel State of Fear in which he characterizes the vast body of evidence about anthropogenic global warming as a conspiracy among scientists. He has argued that modern science has been a great achievement of humankind but that we need to go beyond its narrow confinement to logic, mathematics and the evidence of the mundane world to a broader science that encompasses other realms of consciousness, truths of the inner world. In articulating his theory of everything, Wilber, who was trained in biology, spends quite a bit of time expostulating on matters scientific, for modern science too is a crucial stage in the ever-upward development of humankind. It is a Hegelian kind of theory except that the driving force is not the cumulative development of the consciousness of freedom but the ineluctable rise of humankind from primitive magical thinking through rational and pluralistic stages to the ultimate states of integral and super-integral stages of consciousness and human development.Īlthough we live in the upper middle phases of the evolution, a few individuals have attained such high states of consciousness that, combined with deep knowledge of the actual world, they can see and experience the future of humanity now. Wilber’s system grew out of his experiences of higher states of consciousness (rarified ones that few attain) combined with a conception of a hierarchy of stages of consciousness that he has translated into a theory of the history of the world. Drawing on the great truths of religious traditions east and west, it’s an all-encompassing story – “a theory of everything” – that Wilber has deployed to considerable effect to explain not just all kinds of religious experience and teaching but everything from the nature of consciousness, psychological theories, art, literature, postmodernism, philosophies of all kinds, feminism, sex, ecology and quantum physics, to name only a few. ![]() Ken Wilber has built a large and enthusiastic following over the last 20 years with a series of books building his “integral theory of spirituality”.
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