I try not to have goals. This doesn't work out very well, because I always find a way to sneak them back in. I have a slavish devotion to work, achievement, mastering skills, maximizing my potential and getting to the top.

90% of my waking hours are spent working. An outside observer might think, "You don't look like you are working," but trust me, I find ways of measuring and judging and evaluating my performance so that I can do it better next time. Ayn Rand would love me -- I'm the guy who dedicates his whole life to building towering monuments of human achievement.

That's why when people tell me how great goals are, I run the other way. Sure, there's something to be said for getting up in the morning and doing something worthwhile; everyone wants that. But is it the pinnacle of human experience, as Rand would have it? Will it solve every problem and fill every desire?

From personal experience, I say no. Don't underestimate the human capacity for dissatisfaction and discontent. As a naturally goal-oriented person, I can say that its like getting on a treadmill - you never get to where you are going, because there's always more mill to tread. Its a very Sisyphean kind of hell, and definitely not something I would recommend to people as a life strategy.

So I have a hard time understanding people like Tony Robbins, because it seems to breed dissatisfaction. You have a great car, a huge house and loads of cash, or have developed amazing spiritual discipline and mental attitudes that satisfy some need, temporarily. There's such a thing as wanting to show off how enlightened you are, which some recognize as spiritual materialism. I understand it as a way of protecting the ego from pain, and thus, not fully opening to existence as it is.

Chogyam Trungpa says:

"[Enlightenment] is not a matter of building up the awakened state of mind, but rather of burning out the confusions which obstruct it. In the process of burning out these confusions, we discover enlightenment. If the process were otherwise, the awakened state of mind would be a product, dependent upon cause and effect and therefore liable to dissolution. Anything which is created must, sooner or later, die."

It seems to me that many of these human potential ideas want to strengthen the ego and build it up and make it powerful, to create security in what is ultimately an insecure reality. Not everyone agrees with Buddhist teachings, of course, but this seems like an important teaching that is hard to ignore. There's a strong argument that says that you have to have an ego before you can learn to dissolve it, and it may be necessary to experience the limits of what ego-gratification can do for you, as I have, before you can pursue a spiritual practice.

The really interesting part is that I find that I can't try to stop myself from being goal-oriented, because I will turn that into a new goal. I have ambitions in the same way that I have skin -- I can't escape from my skin, but I don't have to be so attached to it that I can't deal with it being scratched or torn or wrinkled.

This diagram seems awfully familiar...

For those unfamiliar with software engineering, this is the 4+1 architectural view model from the Rational Unified Process which is a set of guidelines, models and structures for software development. Does it map on to the AQAL model? Unless I'm mistaken, its a perfect match.

The AQAL model is split vertically between Interior and Exterior, which RUP4+1 represents as Conceptual and Physical. AQAL is split horizontally between Individual and Collective, which is not labeled in 4+1, but I think its reasonable to say that there's a match there too. The Logical View and Implementation View refer to the meaning of a software component and its actual physical construction. The Process View refers to the interaction between software components, and the Deployment View refers to the environment in which they interact and are linked together.

Update: A tiny problem with this diagram - it has programmers in the UR quadrant when, for the most part, they are in the UL quadrant. Unless you are actually writing in assembly, you are dealing with the interior, or logical perspective of the software.

Now that I've discovered Ken Wilber's blog, I can keep up with the new hotness and drama in the AQAL-osphere. The topic of the moment is Shadow Work, which seems to refer to exploring and understanding unconscious needs and motivations and is something that I have not seen much emphasis on in my (admittedly limited) integral readings. Has my focus has been on the LL and LR quadrants?

By no small co-incidence, this Shadow Work is very close to what I am currently reading, Dan Siegel's Parenting From The Inside Out. Siegel's thesis is fairly conventional: the way we parent our children is influenced by how we ourselves were parented. Where it gets interested is that Siegel advocates self-knowledge and mindfulness in particular to prevent parents from recreating the mistakes of their childhood, and also that we can strengthen our ability to ability to heal from our parents' flaws by drawing from the lessons of neurobiology. The latter approach is what Siegel calls Interpersonal Neurobiology, which seems fairly integral to me. I look forward to reading this side-by-side with Wilber's Integrating the Shadow.

The blog post above links to a pdf extract of The Spectrum of Consciousness, which is now more than 30 years old, and is my first exposure to Wilber's writings of that vintage. The tone seems more focused than recent books, but perhaps at the expense of seeming dry, academic and impersonal. Personally, I prefer the academic style; I value a writer's ability to leave room for the reader to paint his or her own own picture, but some may see that as filled with scary emptiness and the absence of human emotion.

I'm quite certain that this is the exact opposite reaction that most readers of Wilber have, because I think most readers, at least the casual ones, identify strongly as Green and emphasize relationships and sharing of feelings. I think I've passed through Green, but never identified with it -- I could never accept strong epistemic relativism or idealize it after failing to accept it. One other feature of Green thinking always puzzled me is that artists' works should be judged on the sincerity or earnestness of their attempts to express themselves, and never on how effective that work is at what they attempt to express.

So, I have a confession: although he is doubtlessly sincere, I've never been particularly taken by Wilber's poetic extrapolations of Integral/AQAL concepts. Don't get me wrong, there have been some passages that have been inspiring, but overall, I find him a much better thinker than poet. Again, I'm sure he's gotten a lot of feedback saying he's too technical and not personal enough, he needs more heart and more feeling in his writing, which is exactly why I haven't tried to give him the benefit of my highly sought-after opinion.

The content of Wilber's writing is engaging and often exciting, and I would hate to see Wilber lose his focus to improve his poetry. The only reason to point this out is for contrast with his earlier work -- what accounts for the apparent stylistic change -- and to point out that we need not idolize and revere everything that proceeds from Wilber's pen.

One of the first things I did before reading Wilber was to take a look at what the critics have said. I like to go into something new with my eyes open and not take everything at face value. So, in the interest of hearing both sides, I listened to Wilber's response to Meyerhoff's Six Criticisms with great interest. Here's my take on some of them:

Minority Positions

This point had occured to me, although I never interpreted 'orienting generalizations' in the way the Meyerhoff does. He says that they are presented as theories that are generally accepted as true among experts in the field, which was never my understanding. I took it to mean that there are a number of well respected, legitimate theories across disciplines that seem to fall into the same pattern. Wilber's project is to unify these theories that fall into this pattern and explore the implications. Strictly speaking, this doesn't quite 'prove' that the pattern actually exists -- it is a bit of a jump. We rely on a kind of informed intuition (vision-logic?) to guide us through that, but if you aren't willing to take that step, then why bother with Wilber at all?

This raises an interesting point. Perhaps because of an Orange-centered orientation, using intuition, even informed intuition is a big no-no for academics. Wait, let me qualify that -- admitting to using intuition is a big no-no for academics. In practice, scientists and academics routinely rely on intuition to guide them, for example, Gödel and Einstein. Again, this could be vision-logic at work. In fairness, they don't rely on intuition as part of their official proofs and academic work, so what we really have in Wilber's work is 'Notes Toward An Integral Philosophy' rather than a fleshed out philosophic proof.

Perspectival, Not Aperspectival

I agree with this point, but I'm not quite sure that this is actually a criticism of Integral Philosophy. As I understand it, Wilber claims that integral theory is aperspectival, not that his style or mode of discourse is aperspectival. His 'Comedic' style is aimed at what he feels is most effective for his audience. If someone wrote an account of integral theory in a Tragic or Romantic style, I don't think Wilber would say its wrong or not integral. Meyerhoff also accuses Wilber of taking an organicist perspective. Is this a criticism? That's part of the definition of second tier.

A side note: I find Hayden White's Metahistory to be quite compelling. He arranges historical argument into Formalistic, Mechanistic, Contextual and Organic. I propose that these correspond to SD vMemes as: Blue, Orange, Green, Second Tier.

Mystical Disagreement

Wilber acknowledges the multifaceted nature of mystical experience. I think that Wilber is saying that, to the extent that mystical traditions agree, they largely fall into this pattern, but the map is not the territory.

Everyone is Right

Meyerhoff says that Wilber's description of relativism is a straw man that no serious philosopher would agree with. But Wilber is attacking strong epistemic relativism, and perhaps being overly broad when calling it 'relativism'. Meyerhoff claims that no-one really holds that view, but he's wrong. Perhaps professional philosophers don't, but a large number of ordinary people believe in, or want to believe in strong epistemic relativism, especially among Green-centered people or Green transitioning people who make up part of Wilber's audience. Weaker forms of relativism that are merely agnostic about the nature of truth should have no problem with Wilber, such as pragmaticists. Another criticism is that Wilber insists that critics must be in direct dialog with him to adequately criticize his position, which is unfair in a way, but at the same time, he's writing for a popular audience -- of course he sacrifices precision for clarity. There's no reason to suppose that you can get it perfectly from his public writings. That said, not being available for criticism certainly exasperates people and may account for the sometimes acrimonious tone of the debate -- criticism only becomes noticed when its heated, which causes Integral proponents to withdraw, and the cycle feeds back on itself.

Wilber's response (around 11:30 in the audio) also includes a criticism that he is biased toward telos. After reading some of Wilber's work (I think it was A Brief History of Everything), I was under the definite impression that he favored metaphysical telos, and I was glad to hear him reject it because it is the most substantial disagreement I have with his system. He seemed to agree that his writings may not be definite about this point, and that some of his writings were designed to connect with people's intuition about the nature of the universe. It seems like one of his chief aims is to help Green transition to Yellow, or at least get them on board with Integral Theory, and this is where I file his ambiguity about the teleological universe.