Is spiritual the new supernatural?

Richard,

I am 100% in agreement that a major weakness in the Wilberian brand of Integral is its devaluation of the hard sciences and too much theory and speculative thinking at the expense of peer-reviewed research.  Another thing that concerns me is the cult of personality and the promotion of "Integral" as a marketing tool for the sake of profit.  More recent works such as Integral Spirituality and Integral Ecology lack the quality and substance that I had once associated with Ken Wilber.  These newer works--in contrast to Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, A Brief History of Everything, One Taste, The Marriage of Sense and Soul, The Eye of Spirit, Quantum Questions, and so on, to name a few--appear to be less academic and geared more for a newer and more mainstream self-help psychological or new age crowd.

I suspect that there is possibly an invisible hand of marketing at play that may have prompted this shift in target audience from academic to new age/self help-psychology.  Either that, or his books were always that way but that I must have changed in the five years since last reading one of Ken Wilber's books.  Of course--I realize that Integral Ecology wasn't written by Wilber--yet the similarity between the book's methodological approach to Ken Wilber's compulsive mapping and formulaic approach of late is unmistakable.  There's also the danger of covering so much ground for the sake of inclusivity such that a comprehensive understanding of the whole must ultimately be abandoned for a superficial kind of knowledge of bits and pieces of many different parts assembled together.

This is not to say that these Integral maps or tools have no redeeming value whatsoever; only that the overemphasis of such maps and tools can possibly lead to abstractions all around because of covering so much ground to thereby stifle creativity and original ideas.  Other integral contributions and approaches, such as Gebser's important work on the space and time constitution of the structures, cannot be placed into categorical systems such as those and do not lend themselves to representation or mapping in such a framework so are simply omitted as irrelevant..  And without the inclusion of empirical data and science on the right-hand side or any validation process to verify the integrality of the process as a whole--such an approach can lead to all kinds of speculative and new age thinking that is neither scientific nor integrated.  Not to say that it does, but only that it can, and we are left only to wonder what with so much critique surrounding Ken Wilber's work, his cult-like following, and his bypassing the peer review process to recruit a wider mainstream audience instead.

But in spite of the many shortcomings of Integral, there is a reason why I pay for this monthly service: I still owe everything I learned for an entire decade to Ken Wilber from ages 27-37.  Therefore, I am greatly indebted to his teachings from the past.  In addition, I still find most of his newer concepts very useful in spite of their inadequacies.  And feel that I owe it to this community and to Ken to offer my own criticisms free of charge in the absence of others to do so in this community.  At 37, I lost my personal property and entire book collection (with the exception of The Ever-Present Origin by Jean Gebser).  About 2 or 3 years ago I joined Integral Naked, but was never allowed to post or use the media because the $10/month membership there did not provide me premium access.  Then I received notice a few months ago that I could switch my membership to Integral Life, which permitted me to post and use the media here.  However, being rusty and out of date on Integral theory, I purchased what I thought to be his latest book, Integral Spirituality, and found it repetitious and a disappointment.  Not the quality work I remembered from before.

But as to your critique of spirituality or the supernatural, I wouldn't go so far as to insist that all reality must be grounded in some physicality.  This would lead to a devaluation and negation of all interior left-hand quadrants concerned with subjectivity, experience, spirituality, the paranormal, magic, and other nonphysical realities or events which operate below or beyond rationality and aren't amenable to scientific measurement or proof. The post below discusses the immeasurability of space-timelessness (the magic structure) using the miraculous healing at Lourdes as an example, which I thought I would share after reading Anne's comment.  I will try to link it to other posts related to the immeasurability of temporicity (the mythic structure) and to the immeasurability of space-time freedom (the integral-aperspectival structure)--all of which pertain to left-hand nonspatial subjective interiors so cannot be measured spatially using objective right-hand tools, methodologies, or instruments...  But you make an interesting point: Wilber appears to exclude the hard sciences and objectivity to focus only on interiors whereas you appear to exclude the nonphysical subjectivity on the left to focus only on exteriors.  Both are partial, but together you'd make a very good team, if you were Siamese twins.

http://integrallife.com/member/barbi-hammond/blog/space-time-constitution-structures-space-timelessness-magic-structure-part?show=all

Hi Richard.

> If something exists that is non-material, ok - why hasn't anyone proved it yet? If spirituality is a domain of beliefs held without proofs, why would we respect it?

Because in the modern world view its standard operational procedure. Scientific theories are never 'proved'. Thats why they are called 'Theories'. 

Take Newtons Laws for instance. We know for an absolute fact that Newtons law of gravitation is not entirely correct. When you push things close to the speed of light it breaks down for instance. However that doesn't stop it from being very useful and scientists and engineers use it all the time.

However that doesn't mean that its open season for any old idea either. There are procedures to follow, evidence to collect, a community of peers to review and evaluate your findings.

However I suspect I'm being pedantic. Please allow me to rephrase your question in line with what I suspect to be your true intent to be.

Q: "If credence is to be given to the theory that non-material things exist, ok - why hasn't an adequete body of evidence been collected to support this theory."

My Answer: "Grotesque buckets loads of evidence is available to support non-material things existing. However that evidence is specifically excluded by the rules of evidence used by science."

Now you may be rolling your eyes and imagine that I'm thinking about Mystics and Psychics and other such non-sense. Actually I'm thinking about things very, very much closer to home that are so plain and obvious that you don't even think of them as evidence.

Here is a very simply experiment you can do to collect evidence for non-material things.

Step 1. Think to yourself "I am having a thought" while observing that you are having a thought.

Right done. Plain, simply, incredibly obvious. However as hard as it might be to believe, the sort of evidence that you demand of "spirituality" doesn't exist for your thought either.

It doesn't matter what instrument you use, no matter how powerful the microscope or how big the particle accelerator their is no way to collect empirical evidence for thoughts.

You might be able to collect evidence that certain neurons are firing in your brain that correlate to your thought. However neurons firing in your brain are not thoughts. The only way to know that you are having a thought is to ask you. We have to rely on your icky, squidgy, non-scientific, relative subjectivity to determine that.

Okay now lets try a little basic Mysticism.

Step 1. Think to yourself "I am having a thought" while observing that you are having a thought and observe that there is a thought and there is an observer.

Now wonder who that observer is. Maybe neurons represent an encoding for thoughts, but how can neurons "observe" anything in the manner that you just did. Maybe other neurons might be wired up to the neurons encoding the thought but how can they become an observer?

Done.

Now there are people who claim that you can follow this particular trail and form of experimentation all the way to God. I'm not one of those people because I'm still working on it. And even If I did it still isn't scientifically valid, empirical evidence. But it isn't magical "believe anything I like" either. Its a post-rational, experiential investigation into being based on sound reasoning, introspection and experience.