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enlightenment
May 2009 
Progress report and comments
M. Alan
Well, I've been - and still are - extremely busy on my book, Integral Metaphysics and Transformation. As always, it's turned out much harder than I thought,. because my obsessive perfectionism won't let me just writre a basic rough intro. Instead I have to revise and add more insights, more material. Sometimes I end up reorganising stuff. I had hoped to finish it before the end of this year, but that doesn't look likely now.
I can however promise you that, when it's finished, this will be an amazing book. If anyone is intersted in reading some chapters, let me know. Mostly I've been working on the subject of emanation, hypostases, involution. I compare different teachings, as well as proposing my own synthesis. The emphasis is esotericism, especially from the Integral Yoga perspective.
So far I'm working with the idea of five major hypostases. These are (with Sri Aurobindo's terminology in brackets for the first three)
o The Unmanifest Absolute Reality (Sachchidananda)
o The Manifest Absolute Reality (Supermind)
o The Noetic Reality (Overmind)
o The Nondual Reality (standard Enlightenment)
o The Prakritic Reality (the Cosmos, planes of existence, gross and subtle matter)
Readers familiar with the traditional meme of the "Great chain of being" or ontological spectrum will understand what is being described here. More unusual, to those unfamiliar with Sri Aurobindo's insights, is that the "nondual" state of Enlightenment (normally considered the very highest state of consciousness, the Absolute Reality) has a relatively low position, second from the bottom. If this arrangement seems strange, especially to those used to the comparison tables and charts provided by Wilber and others, consider that none of the popular Gurus in the West, and none of the main writers and teachers in the Integral Movement so far, really understand what Sri Aurobindo actually taught (on my website I mention the misunderstandings of Adi Da, of Osho, and of Ken Wilber in this regard).
This is in no way to criticise the sincerity of those Integralists who study Sri Aurobindo from an intellectual perspective only. But inevitably mistakes creep in, because Sri Aurobindo represnets a much higher level of consciousness then that attained by even the most enlightened in the cutting edge consciousness paradigm in the West. Pop Gurus (1960s onwards), New Paradigm transpersonal psychology and spirituality (1970s onwards), the Integral Movement (1990s onwards), and all the rest, go as far as the Nondual stage, but no further. What is described here will be the esoteric perspective, based on Plotinus (another great teacher who has been misunderstood in the mainstream Integral Movement), Sri Aurobindo, and other teachings.
I also do refer to the Integral movement later in the book, when i talk about planetary transformation or global mindshift. It is here that the Integral Movement comes into its own. As mentioned in a previous blog post, i am now much more interested in collaboration, rather than criticism. I have been meaning to write an essay showing parallels between Andrew Cohen's concept of evolutionary enlightenment and my own ideas, but haven't because I've been so busy on the book, which is my first priority here.
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The weird thing about this discussion is that Wilber and Wilberites *think* that they incorporate the descending principle. Wilber writes an awful lot about ascent and descent in SES, the incorporation of which is what I take to be the point of SA's higher realities, like the 'manifest absolute'. But Wilber then often goes into a kind of zen ambiguity regarding whether it is the truly outside world which is changed through enlightenment, or the inner world of the subject, or both simultaneously. Wilber tends to go for the second option (most clearly in his rejection of Teilhard in SES), and sometimes seems to imply the third option, whereas I take SA to be talking about the first option. But then you've got a dualism between the world and the subject…don't you?
I would appreciate hearing for Wilberites on whether they perceive Wilber's teachings similarly, as well as from Aurobindonians on SA.
Hi Goethean!
Yeah KW's problem is that he comes from an Advaito-Buddhistic perspective (“Nondual Reality” in my series of hypostases), so anything higher is meaningless to him. And to rely on Zen ambiguity is imho just a cop out. All KW, and Wilberians, and others in the mainstream IM, need to do is read Chpater 5 of the Introduction of Synthesis of Yoga, and the last four chapters of The Life Divine, and everything would be explained. So one of the things my book will hopefully do is clear up all these misconceptions that have crept in re SA in the IM
re Teilhard. Despite the striking similarities, SA is even more radical than Teilhard; Teilhard still sees the Omega Point in a transcendent sense, SA & M see it as a transformation even of physical matter
Re the three options you mention, SA also referrs to the transformation of the individual self, so for him both the individual self, the social collectivity, and the objective physical world are changed. So ironically, SA's description of Supramentalisation is actually far more in keeping with Wilber's own AQAL (as it involves both subject and object, and inner and outer), whereas Wilber's spirituality is non-integral because it only involves (as you point out with his rejection of Teilhard in SES) the transcendence of the world; UL in Wilber's terminology. Again, this UL spirituality/Liberation is perfectly in keeping with the nondual perspective KW advocates. Nothing wrong with it; and SA himself always referred to the earlier spiritualities in a respectful way, and rebuked his disciples if they were critical of the old spiritualities. So it is not that the old paths are deficcient. Only that the new one embodies a more complete and greater and more encompassing Realisation. So encompassing in fact that for the first time there is the possibtity, even the certainty, of the divine transformation of even objective matter)
…All KW, and Wilberians, and others in the mainstream IM, need to do is read Chpater 5 of the Introduction of Synthesis of Yoga…
Do you mean “…Chapter 5 and the introduction…”?
Do you mean “…Chapter 5 and the introduction…”?
No, the chapters are confusingly numbered (at least in my third edition). The Intro has chapters one to five I to V). Then Part I, Karma Yoga, starts with its own chapter 1 (i.e. chapter 1 of Part 1) and goes through to thirteen. Then Part II, Yoga of Knowledge, starts with its chapter 1 and so on. So i mean chapter V of the intro