Ken Wilber - Integral Psychology

INTEGRAL

PSYCHOLOGY

Consciousness, Spirit,

Psychology, Therapy

Ken Wilber

SHAMBHALA

Boston & London

2011

S HAMBHALA P UBLICATIONS , I NC .

Horticultural Hall

300 Massachusetts Avenue

Boston, Massachusetts 02115

www.shambhala.com

2000 by Ken Wilber

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

L IBRARY OF C ONGRESS C ATALOGING-IN -P UBLICATION D ATA

Wilber, Ken.

Integral psychology: consciousness, spirit, psychology, therapy/Ken Wilber.1st pbk. ed.

p. cm.

Condensed version of Ken Wilbers System, self, and structure, which has previously only been available in volume four of The collected works of Ken Wilber.

Includes index.

eISBN 978-0-8348-2114-9

ISBN-13 978-1-57062-554-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Consciousness. 2. PsychologyPhilosophy.

I. Wilber, Ken. Works. 1998. II. Title.

BF 311. W5765 2000 99053186

150dc21

Contents

A DAYLIGHT VIEW

T HE WORD psychology means the study of the psyche, and the word psyche means mind or soul. In the Microsoft Thesaurus , for psyche we find: self: atman, soul, spirit; subjectivity: higher self, spiritual self, spirit. One is reminded, yet again, that the roots of psychology lie deep within the human soul and spirit.

The word psyche or its equivalent has ancient sources, going back at least several millennia BCE , where it almost always meant the animating force or spirit in the body or material vehicle. Sometime in sixteenth-century Germany, psyche was coupled with logos word or studyto form psychology , the study of the soul or spirit as it appears in humans. Who actually first used the word psychology is still debated; some say Melanchthon, some say Freigius, some say Goclenius of Marburg. But by 1730 it was being used in a more modern sense by Wolff in Germany, Hartley in England, Bonnet in Franceand yet even then psychology still meant, as the New Princeton Review of 1888 defined it, the science of the psyche or soul.

I once started taking notes for a history of psychology and philosophy that I was planning on writing. I had decided to do so because, in looking at most of the available history of psychology textbooks, I was struck by a strange and curious fact, that they all told the story of psychologyand the psycheas if it abruptly came into being around 1879 in a laboratory in the University of Leipzig, headed by Wilhelm Wundt, who indeed was the father of a certain type of psychology anchored in introspection and structuralism. Still, did the psyche itself just jump into existence in 1879?

A few textbooks pushed back a little further, to the forerunners of Wundts scientific psychology, including Sir Francis Galton, Hermann von Helmholtz, and particularly the commanding figure of Gustav Fechner. As one textbook breathlessly put it, On the morning of October 22, 1850an important date in the history of psychologyFechner had an insight that the law of the connection between mind and body can be found in a statement of quantitative relation between mental sensation and material stimulus. Fechners law, as it was soon known, is stated as S = K log I (the mental sensation varies as the logarithm of the material stimulus). Another text explained its importance: In the early part of the century, Immanuel Kant had predicted that psychology could never become a science, because it would be impossible to experimentally measure psychological processes. Because of Fechners work, for the first time scientists could measure the mind; by the mid-nineteenth century the methods of science were being applied to mental phenomena. Wilhelm Wundt would take these original and creative achievements and organize and integrate them into a founding of psychology.

Every textbook seemed to agree that Gustav Fechner was one of the major breakthrough figures in the founding of modern psychology, and text after text sang the praises of the man who figured out a way to apply quantitative measurement to the mind, thus finally rendering psychology scientific. Even Wilhelm Wundt was emphatic: It will never be forgotten, he announced, that Fechner was the first to introduce exact methods, exact principles of measurement and experimental observation for the investigation of psychic phenomena, and thereby to open the prospect of a psychological science, in the strict sense of the word. The chief merit of Fechners method is this: that it has nothing to apprehend from the vicissitudes of philosophical systems. Modern psychology has indeed assumed a really scientific character, and may keep aloof from all metaphysical controversy. This Dr. Fechner, I presumed, had saved psychology from contamination by soul or spirit, and had happily reduced the mind to measurable empirical doodads, thus ushering in the era of truly scientific psychology.

That is all I heard of Gustav Fechner, until several years later, when I was rummaging through a store filled with wonderfully old philosophy books, and there, rather shockingly, was a book with a striking title Life after Death written in 1835, and by none other than Gustav Fechner. It had the most arresting opening lines: Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever.

And so proceeded this treatise on waking forever. In the first stage man lives in the dark, alone; in the second, he lives associated with, yet separated from, his fellow-men, in a light reflected from the surface of things; in the third, his life, interwoven with... universal spirit... is a higher life.

In the first stage his body develops itself from its germ, working out organs for the second; in the second stage his mind develops itself from its germ, working out organs for the third; in the third the divine germ develops itself, which lies hidden in every human mind.

The act of leaving the first stage for the second we call Birth; that of leaving the second for the third, Death. Our way from the second to the third is not darker than our way from the first to the second: one way leads us forth to see the world outwardly; the other, to see it inwardly.

From body to mind to spirit, the three stages of the growth of consciousness; and it is only as men and women die to the separate self that they awaken to the expansiveness of universal Spirit. There was Fechners real philosophy of life, mind, soul, and consciousness; and why did the textbooks not bother to tell us that ? Thats when I decided I wanted to write a history of psychology, simply because Somebody has got to tell.

(Tell that the notion of the unconscious was made popular by von Hartmanns Philosophy of the Unconscious , which was published in 1869thirty years before Freudand went into an unprecedented eight editions in ten years, and von Hartmann was expressing Schopenhauers philosophy, which Schopenhauer himself explicitly stated he derived mostly from Eastern mysticism, Buddhism and the Upanishads in particular: under the individual consciousness lies a cosmic consciousness, which for most people is unconscious, but which can be awakened and fully realized, and this making conscious of the unconscious was men and womens greatest good. That Freud directly took the concept of the id from Georg Groddecks The Book of the It , which was based on the existence of a cosmic Tao or organic universal spirit. That... well, it is a long story, all of which powerfully reminds us that the roots of modern psychology lie in spiritual traditions, precisely because the psyche itself is plugged into spiritual sources. In the deepest recesses of the psyche, one finds not instincts, but Spiritand the study of psychology ought ideally to be the study of all of that, body to mind to soul, subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious, sleeping to half-awake to fully awake.)