Shadowing Wilber and A Confession

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.