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The Loft Series

Einstein of Consciousness Confesses: I Was Wrong, But I'm Still Right.

Contributor: Ken Wilber

<< 3 of 19 in The Loft Series >>

Einstein of Consciousness Confesses: I Was Wrong, But I'm Still Right

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Duration: 29 minutes

A few weeks ago, Ken was asked the following question: Given your relatively recent articulation of the difference between structure-stages and state-stages, if you could, what would you change in your past books and why? Now, given the fact that for several decades Ken just stacked states on top of the highest structures, you may suspect this distinction to have devastating consequences on his prior work. But, as it turns out, this is not the case—and the reason why is quite interesting: "If my mind couldn't saying something with a great deal of certainty, it just wouldn't say it. It would just skip the topic... and it would do so in a way that you wouldn't know it was skipping the topic."

With that said, Ken details the changes he would make in two books. The first concerns the developmental charts in the back of Integral Psychology, which he'd prefer to separate into two sets, one containing the various lines in structural development and the second containing the spiritual or contemplative lines. The second book due for a overhaul would be Up From Eden, where Ken describes how a culture's average and advanced modes of consciousness are actually referring to its average level of structural development and its most advanced or highest degree of state-stage access, respectively. Despite this not-so-insignificant edit, his presentation of the characteristics, timing, and correlations of structure and stage emergence remain essentially correct. And, for those of you yet to read Up from Eden, he spends the majority of this segment discussing what is surely one of the greatest integral historiographies of structure and state-stage emergence across the course of human evolution.

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Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber is the most widely translated academic writer in America, with 25 books translated into some 30 foreign languages, and is the first philosopher-psychologist to have his Collected Works published while still alive. Wilber is an internationally acknowledged leader and the preeminent scholar of the Integral stage of human development, which continues to gather momentum around the world. His many books, all of which are still in print, can be found at Amazon.com. Some of his more popular books include Integral Spirituality; No Boundary; Grace and Grit; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; and the "everything" books: A Brief History of Everything (one of his largest selling books) and A Theory of Everything (probably the shortest introduction to his work). Ken Wilber is the founder of Integral Institute, Inc., the co-founder of Integral Life, Inc., and the Senior Fellow of Integral Life Spiritual Center.