The Status of States

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I only just found this blog/thread and want to add a few points, it's been a very interesting discussion.

I remember speaking with Ken on a conference call one time and he basically said that IPM applies only to the manifestations or expressions of Spirit - not un-manifest or formless Emptiness. This is also Robb's point, I think. But it does leave the question as to whether an IPM involves (relative) injunctions to realize (absolute) non-dual Emptiness...

As far as I can tell Absolute knowing is radical Not-knowing, another one of those unavoidable paradoxes... That is, non-dual awareness is simply not a matter of knowing, in the sense of getting a handle or cognitive grasp on things and so it slips away from the traditional metaphysical search, with its representational thinking and dualistic language.

But at the same time (and I think Robb may be touching on this) the Absolute does arrive like a Gift, it is an overflowing excess of given-ness (Jean Luc-Marion) and in this sense it is pre-given, or something like a metaphysical or trans-historical reality. So despite the demands of a post-metaphysical spirituality to avoid 'independently existing' or 'timeless' realities... it seems that they do exist. I call it Grace, it has nothing to do with human effort in the relative world, and it's much the same as what they call Non-dual awareness in the East.

Also, about Nagarjuna. If he's correct then the entire history of Western theology - discourse about God - is a history of nonsensical lies... This view is not without some merit (lol), contemplative silence is the direct appraoch to Spirit, but Nagarjuna's dialectic is called negative (apophatic) theology in the Western traditions - as opposed to positive (cataphatic) theology, which makes some positive assertions... But I'm not as welded to Nagarjuna as Ken is, simply because I reckon it would be pretty hard to have any kind of inter-spiritual dialogue with Nagarjuna at the table, his dialectic of Emptiness is a kind of conversation stopper...

There's an added twist to all this because in Western Christianity it is said that the Absolute actually showed up in the reltive world, just once, in the person of Jesus - i.e. the "Logos made flesh" or the embodied story of God-in-time. And so speaking about the Absolute is a legitimate exercise - it's called theology or God-talk - and its usually done with paradoxes, analogies, poetic-metaphors and symbols... Many of these approaches can also be said to slip through the grasp of metaphysical certainties... and they can also be invoked as a skillful means for awakening or realization...

So I would argue that an IPM is basically a post-metaphysics for the relative world, while there are other methods for doing the post-metaphsyical thing when it comes to the Absolute, particuarly in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Cameron

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"Become passers-by" (Jesus of Nazareth)

Let's view another passage from Integral Spirituality to illustrate the metaphysical nature of Ken's theorizing.  On page 111 in the Boomeritis Buddhism chapter, Ken shows how certain experiences are interpreted differently by different traditions.

Note right off this division between "experience" and "interpretation."  As Ken explains in this section, IPM applies only to the "interpretation" element.  "Experience" thus becomes an injection point where a given enters, a form of direct access to that given.

Thus does Ken say, regarding the "experience" of "stages" (?) leading to causal (underlining mine):

Hindus, Buddhists and Christians follow the same general stages (gross to subtle to causal), but one of them experiences these stages as "absolute Self," one as "no-self," and one as "Godhead," depending on the different texts, culture, and interpretations given the experiences.  In other words, depending on the Framework, the View.

Those individuals who assume otherwise are simply assuming a pre-modernist epistemology, that there is a single pregiven reality that I can know, and that meditation will show me this independently existing reality, which therefore must be the same for everybody who discovers it; instead of realizing that the subject of knowing co-creates the reality it knows, and that therefore some aspects of reality will literally be created by the subject and the interpretation it gives to that reality.

Notice "some aspects of reality."  Where did the "some" come from?  Its purpose in the above is to divide "experience" from "interpretation," rendering the experience a form of direct access to the reality (or non-reality, doesn't matter) in question.  Thus in a footnote to the above quote, Ken spells out what is not "co-created" (underlining mine):

Emptiness itself is not created or co-created, but Form is, and Emptiness is co-emergent with Form, therefore Nondual realization is in part interpretive.

From this it is clear that "emptiness" is of the status of experience-in-itself.  Here we have representationalist thinking reproduced at the experiential level.  Of course, representationalist thinking necessarily generates a dualist split, because the representationalist thinking mode is based on an initial posited separation of subject from object (and never the two shall meet).  That split, as it must, ramifies through the representationalist's entire theory, being based on a split, which manifests as Ken's divide between manifest and unmanifest.  Thus does Ken speak of AQAL applying only to "objects" and "things."  Representationalist redux.

This splitting leaves uncomfortable questions about the real, breathing, carbohydrate-burning person "doing" the emptiness experience---that person being evolved and formlike and having AQAL attributes, etc.  That real person seems just to disappear in what looks to me as a reformulated, but unacknowledged 100%-mentalist scheme.  But apart from that unfitting remainder, and as yet another feature of the representationalism underlying Ken's approach, what must be posited to make the system work is direct access to the thing-in-itself (here, nothingness-in-itself), which is accomplished by "experience."

IPM is thus narrowed to a purely LL reformulation of "interpretations," basically confining it out of existence so far as de-metaphysics is concerned.

And where, one might ask, comes the ability to discern between which aspects of any given (experience?) are subject-influenced or -created and which aspects are not?  Presumably only God or some innate given knowing would know.  So many scattered givens.

I appreciate everyone's comments so far; I think we're circling around some vital questions here, and I will return to some of them in my individual responses.  In this post, however, I want to return to the central question of this blog entry, since I think most responses so far have not actually addressed it (but rather have weighed in at more general levels).

Several people have made remarks along the line that metaphysics amounts to assertions without evidence, or postmetaphysics accepts as real only what can be experienced, and while I agree with these remarks, I think they are incomplete in themselves for really describing what is involved in a post-metaphysical approach.  Both comments, in fact, could be taken (by themselves) as arguments for empiricism (perhaps an expanded empiricism), but in my understanding (and I am sure others here will acknowledge and agree with this) an integral post-metaphysical approach is an enactive (or tetra-enactive) one -- one that recognizes that neither evidence nor experience simply "disclose" reality as it is, but rather are participatory enactments (which ineluctably involve the "kosmic address" of the experiencer or interpreter).

With that said, I want to return to the main question in my post:  What role do "states" play in Integral theory?  As the constants on the W-C Lattice, are they best understood as evolutionary or involutionary givens?  If the latter, I don't see how they be taken as anything other than metaphysical constructs.

As I illustrated in my opening post, Wilber appears to suggest in Excerpt G that states are evolutionarily emergent phenomena, arising in dependence on or in correlation with complexification of matter. But in other places, Wilber directly links the major states to aspects of his involutionary (pre-evolutionary) model, such as in his discussion of deep sleep / causal-state experience, which is said to give direct access to timeless Spirit, the "pure Emptiness of the I Am" that existed before the Big Bang, the formless Self that actually gave rise to the Big Bang through its involutionary gesture.

For anyone who does not see this as a metaphysical claim, I would really appreciate it if you helped me to better see how this sort of claim actually passes post-metaphysical muster. 

(And, for the record, I ask this as someone who actually has "experienced" wakefulness in deep dreamless sleep.  I spent three years training in dream and sleep yoga under a Tibetan Dzogchen master.  I have witnessed the body go "off-line," the senses drop off one by one, as I have transitioned into deep dreamless sleep; I have knowingly entered that "unknowing" gap; I have watched the body slowly re-emerge and felt the world appear to coalesce as I returned to waking consciousness.  And even though I've "had" these experiences, I still do not see how I could definitively assert, without an appeal to metaphysics, that I have actually realized the pre-Big Bang ground of the universe.)

My contention is that the states component, as Wilber is using it, serves as a metaphysical anchor of his overall model -- rather than being contingent post-metaphysical enactments.  This claim, I believe, is bolstered by the careful division Wilber makes between state and interpretation, or experience and interpretation -- as constants, the states are "givens," the same for one and all, that then receive an overlay of varying interpretations at different stages of evolutionary development.

If I am missing something, I would certainly like to see more clearly what it is.  But at this point, I see strong metaphysical elements being preserved in the current Integral spiritual model.  (As metaphysical claims, they are graceful and aesthetically satisfying, but still metaphysical.)

All the best,

Balder

Further into the character and functioning of representationalist givens.

I think the world is precisely what gets lost in doctrines of representation and scientific objectivity.  Donna Haraway

Of course, every theory is true, provided you suitably associate its symbols with observed quantities.  Albert Einstein

Allow me here to recapitulate certain descriptions above and tie them back more clearly to this question of states, and particularly to highlight state as thing-in-itself injection point.

Generated within the pattern called representationalist thinking is the thing represented or observed, typically called the object, and an observer of the thing, typically called the subject.  Mediating subject and object is knowledge.  Representationalist thinking thus posits or generates or creates, in its very activity, a fundamental split.

This split creates, per Kant, an inaccessible thing-in-itself, a terrific gap.  Knowledge, being not the thing-in-itself, can only sight that gap and not close it.  Thus a representationalist gap, as Robb essentially said above, can, by a fine-tuning of one’s knowledge of the thing, be narrowed asymptotically, but never crossed.  This is, in a sense, Cartesian dualism.

So, we have an observer, an observed, knowledge and a gap, and this gap cannot be bridged by any effort of further knowledge of the observed. 

The only way to bridge that gap is therefore by assertion.  This “assertion,” so-called, in a theoretical scheme, and particularly a representationalist theory, is called a given.

In Ken’s scheme, this given---the asserted overcoming of the gap---is “experience-in-itself,” or "experience" for short.  But note, the observed thing-in-itself, to be “experienced,” must somehow be present-as-it-is to the observer---the very "thing" right inside the observer, purely as it is, the original.  It cannot be re-presented, mere knowledge, because representation is what got this gap-thing going in the first place.  Further representation is but further knowledge facing the uncrossable asymptotic canyon.

In Ken’s theory, the observed thing-in-itself is presented-as-it-is to awareness by virtue of that very thing ever-residing inside the subject, hiding there, waiting to be "discovered."  The thing-in-itself, in the observer, is thus a pregiven-thing, as it must be.  And all one need do, then, to cross the observer-observed divide, seemingly, is master a means of directly accessing---to "experience"---that pregiven thing.  (Note that this but displaces the canyon elsewhere---to unmanifest-manifest---but j'digress; more on that below.)

This is where Ken’s notions of states come in.  States are “ever present” in Ken’s theory.  This "ever-present," the thing-in-itself, resides in the core of the observer as "state," latent and literally asleep in the (at first unrecognized) form of deep dreamless sleep.  The observer’s directly-accessing or "experiencing" these states, and particularly the higher causal state, goes by the name of Enlightenment.  In the Enlightened “state,” one literally falls into the thing-in-itself, this Given element, otherwise known as Emptiness, the Absolute, the Etc.  Thus from the Introduction to Integral Spirituality:

The great wisdom traditions … maintain that the 3 natural states of consciousness---waking, dreaming, and deep formless sleep---actually contain a treasure trove of spiritual wisdom and spiritual awakening … if we know how to use them correctly … In a special sense, which we will explore as we go along, the 3 great natural states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep might [I'll give you the answer: do] contain an entire spectrum of spiritual enlightenment.

Falling into a pregiven state is what Wilber calls “transformation,” otherwise known as resting in the "ever-present" (not and never "re-presented") “Witness,” “pure consciousness without an object,” “pure subjectivity,” or what I prefer to call the ever-present ObjectObserver, all fine representationalist denotations.  And notice in this everpresentness an ever-present subject-object divide.  And of course, further knowledge of anything at all will not cross that divide, because, again, gap-creating representationalist knowledge just recreates and recreates the asymptotic canyon.  Thus everpresentness is found directly inside as a pregiven within.  This pregiven---curiously graded pregivens, actually---comprise the W-C horizontalized “states.”

These states, being pure givens, are not subject to non-given-world processes, are completely other than any such process or that upon or in which the process works (displaced gap resurfaced in: matter).  That non-given world is the world of "manifestation," what I like to call matterfestation, where evolution reigns.  The evolved-world’s interfacing with states goes by the name “interpretation” of "experience."  From Waves, Streams, States:

Thus, it appears that the three general states are largely given, but the various structure-stages develop. And because all of them are set in the four quadrants, even the states (which are given prior to culture) are nonetheless firmly molded by the particular culture in which they unfold (because they are molded, in fact, by all four quadrants–intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social).

Again, from IS p 111-12:

Buddhist training does many things, but it is particularly a state-training that deconstructs one's identity from mere gross ego, to subtle soul ... and finally to no-self Self.  But as Traleg emphasizes, those experiences depend, at every point, on a correct interpretation ...

[T]here isn't just meditative experience per se---that simply does not exist.  There is meditative experience plus the interpretations you give it.

Thus do we see here the necessity of Right View.  How from among all other views one is guided to choose the Right View---being the View of what this experience truly is, Emptiness-itself---is not explained (by definition, it must be given).  Right View, here, becomes a stand-in for the givenness of the "experience" of the "state" it "interprets," thus recapitulating, through binary oppositeness of Rightness vs. False, thing-in-itself division where "View" resolves as recognition-of-given-formlessness:

Which brings us back to where we began: there is emptiness (and the formless mind), and there is the manifest world (and the conceptual mind), and so the question is: what form in the mind will help both realize and express emptiness?  Some form or view is there, like it or not, and so correct view has always been maintained as absolutely necessary for enlightenment.  As Traleg says, it is the vehicle of realization, without which even meditation is blind. (114)

And because the states are pure, are thing-in-itself-purity without movement or change, evolved-world interfacing, and not the thing, evidences change relative to the unchanging states.  

This state-referred flux, a kind of evolved-world struggling, also goes by the name of state "mastery."  Thus what apparently might look like state-unfolding, which might indicate states themselves evolved, aren't pure, aren't Absolute or Etc., can be thrown onto mastery-evolution.  From p. 240 of Integral Spirituality:

Although those states are ever-present, humanity as a whole seemed to learn to master them in roughly the same order as meditators do today …

Note, also, that “state” mastery, per the staticity of stateness, is a one-time job that, post-mastery, goes nowhere: purity is purity and cannot become more pure.  Even peak-"experience" is a zero to 100% affair then back to zero, with a hangover.  In mastery, one is Enlightened and, from the vantage point of states, movement must be sought elsewhere.  Having sucked the juice from states, one must turn to the evolved world for a little fun.  

Luckily, the "manifest" world is also called Spirit---Spirit in action.  And in this "relative" world, because evolution is evolution by closer degrees toward Spirit, and because this Spirit-evolving-to-Spirit never reaches Spirit---evolution to Absolute being asymptotic---relative gaming goes to infinity.  But I thought Spirit was totally grasped in a state?  Oh well, onward to Spirit.

And thus do we have a very colourful representationalist myth.