Evolution of Consciousness: The End | The Edge of Grace
Regarding their degree of evolved consciousness, Wilber likens the developmental stage of indigenous people to the infant’s “animism,” wherein the child’s undifferentiated consciousness believes that everything happens because of him.
I don’t find them comparable at all, except in superficial ways. I find him committing his own error, his pre/trans fallacy.
I find this assessment of primal consciousness just plain wrong. Everything I’ve read about indigenous peoples, past and present, and my pitiful encounters with attempts to live in their way, shows a tremendous canniness, intelligence, diversity, and sophistication according to many different measures—just not the same measures we modern humans are accustomed to, such as technological complexity or specialization of roles. And, at base, you can’t be in an infant state of immersion in your surroundings when you have to make really clear distinctions in order to avoid getting eaten by predators! ....
[...] In my eyes, these things challenge some of the very foundations of Wilber’s theory. If those early stages of development are, in fact, very advanced, then how can you speak of an evolution from then to now? That evolutionary theory is exposed as just another version of the myth of progress that we’ve been hypnotized into believing in.
Thus, Wilber’s theory loses its strength for me.
[....] embracing the linearity of Wilber’s model has led me to this place where I’m running into the “orange meme,” and according to the model, I can only move forward into higher levels of rationality and transrationality.
And what I’m realizing lately is that I don’t want to move forward along those lines. Neither do I want to move backward. I want to move … sideways. And step out of his model, the same model that says indigenous spirituality is less developed and scientific reasoning more, the same model that says that ritual magic is prerational and mystical states of yogic meditation transrational.
I think I do want to conflate what he considers prerational and transrational. I begin to feel that the differences are not as he believes, at least when it comes to cultures and whole peoples. And if so, I want to commit the pre/trans fallacy.
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