Ascending and Descending

And then, we go back to transcend and include.

I wanted to dig back into the work of Ken Wilber in today’s newsletter, specifically the way he breaks down our culture into transcenders vs. descenders in a way that is deeply clarifying—in his camp, we must be both in order to actually embody nonduality. In my first post about A Brief History of Everything, I explored some of the key themes from his work a few weeks ago: holons (the idea that everything is both complete in of itself and part of something else); holarchies (holons are structured on an evolutionary chain that becomes more densely conscious as it evolves, i.e. a bat is more conscious than a banana); and all systems can be arranged in a quadrant where the top is singular (I/It), and the bottom is collective (We/Its), the left side is the personal (I/We), and the right side is empirical (It/Its). You can read more about this here.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to write more about Wilber’s work, including why what’s happening in psychedelics gives me some pause. I’m a fan in most therapeutic instances, but Wilber makes the point that you can ascend to a higher state of consciousness through drugs or some other expansive experience without actually…achieving a higher stage of consciousness. I have some concerns that people don’t get this, have a big experience, and then they believe that they are…divine, special, here to single-handedly save the world, ya know, GOD, without any context or any of the essential inner work to actually evolve. But I digress. (This also dovetails with all my posts about darkness and tapping into energies that we don’t understand: Here’s Understanding Spiritual Power, When Communities are in Shadow, and Understanding Collective Darkness.) I’m also going to write how Wilber’s theory of evolution—transcend and include—applies to our current political quandary, hopefully without getting over my skis.

Robert Fludd. Urtriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, in duo volumnia secundum cosmi differntiam diuisa. Vol. 1. Enlarged version. Frankfurt: J. T. Bry, 1624. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (157)

In A Brief History of Everything, Wilber breaks down the past 2,000 or so years—the span of Judeo-Christian Patriarchy—into a battle between Ascenders and Descenders. There are the Ascenders, or those who believe in the fall, that there’s nothing but depravity here on this planet, and our sole goal is to get to heaven, somewhere else, up above; and then the Descenders, who believe that material reality is the only thing that exists, that any form of faith is a type of delusion.