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That is a story. If we forget the story, we forget who we are. Where and how do we find order? We find order through our ability to understand there is only one story and that our story is part of it. There are no separate journeys for there are no separate men to make them.
Ken Wilber
All men are one and there is no other tale to tell. In order to do that we must stand witness for each other. Stories founded on the paradox of consciousness show us whether the storyteller is awake and aware or asleep and blind. In these books the folks who live closest to nature, closest to necessity, closest to death seem to be the most awake and aware. They see best the interplay of the transcendent and man in life and the impossibility of pulling apart the threads of the story to analyze whose part is whose:. And all in it is a tale and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these also are the selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them.
So everything is necessary. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be dispensed with. Because the seams are hid from us, you see. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to know what could be taken away. We have no way to tell what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. The point of looking into ourselves is, through our imaginative abilities, to pull us out of ourselves.
If we pull ourselves out of ourselves, we get a little reflective distance and are better able to remember and stay awake.
If we resist the pull of the metaxy , then we cannot get out of ourselves. In extreme resistance, we fall into oblivion or gnosticism and completely lose the thread of the tale. McCarthy most eloquently summarizes all this in the Epilogue to Cities of the Plain.
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And if the measure of life is death, the measuring line is immortality. The story of Er is a symbol of man, existing in time and experiencing himself as participating in the timeless. The Epilogue is immediately preceded by the death of John Grady Cole. Billy holds the precious bloody sacrifice in his arms and calls out to God: Nothing ever has changed or ever will change. In both The Crossing and Cities of the Plain Billy wants to stand outside the drama of being and not get too involved.
But he is too awake, too in-tune with reality, and too honest to be fooled. Billy wants to forget. But an owl that flies spread eagle into a pickup truck window is his reminder that he always will remember and that no matter how much he wants to resist, in the end, he always acts.
He always stands witness. But he is never comfortable there either, and so he never seems to find a place in the world. Billy can never fully commit himself to the middle. But he is ardent-hearted enough to love the men who can and do. He does honor their path and listen to their tales.
The drama of being will not let Billy just go. Days of the world. Years of the world. Till he was old. Where in this madhouse is there room for a rational discussion of immortality that presupposes the very contact with reality that has been lost? Perhaps, somewhere in the middle of Arizona, underneath the overpass of the interstate, where cranes fly north from Mexico. The stranger seems to just materialize—without history, without genealogy, without beginning or end. They begin a conversation about death as they share some crackers under the rumbling traffic.
I tried to see the pattern that it made upon the earth because I thought that if I could see the pattern and identify the form of it then I would know better how to continue. I would know what my path must be. I would see into the future of my life. For good or bad. He has been firmly in Thing-Reality with its subject-object dichotomy. He acts ardently when he has to out of friendship in spite of the spiritual wasteland through which he has been riding. The stranger continues by telling Billy a dream, a dream that made him know it was the middle of his life and draw the map.
The dream is the descent into the deepest reaches of the psyche where it is in contact with the cosmos. In the dream a traveler is making his way through the mountains. He comes to a certain demonic place, like the spirited and numinous location at the end of the Story of Er, where pilgrims take their rest. The place was high in the mountains or the In-Between. And at the place was a table of rock that had been used to slaughter victims to appease the gods.
Life, the stranger says, is participation in some dream or drama from outside the rims and edges of the world that is also a place in a dream or drama. But during the night the dream man is having a dream. What kind of reality can a dream within a dream possess? Not much, thinks Billy, who considers it Superstition: On it you saw a picture of a face. It is our effort through remembrance to constitute the full reality of consciousness. But consciousness is shrouded in the very mystery it seeks to comprehend. How are they separate? It is that which we have no way to show. It is that which is missing from our map and from the picture that it makes.
And yet it is all we have. Yet that might be enough. Now the dream traveler finds himself at the intersection of the paradox of determination and free will, thing-reality and It-reality:. And the ground of that history is not different from yours and mine for it is the predicate life of men that assures us of our own reality and that of all about us. The story continues as the man on the mountain composed himself for sleep. There was a storm in the mountains and the lightning cracked and the wind moaned.
In the flare of the lightning the traveler saw a procession of a troupe of men descending down through the rocky arroyos singing some kind of chant or prayer. In a long passage the procession is described in language that evokes the lines of The Republic where the dead are assembled in a great plain, with dreadful and beautiful sounds of sirens singing their single note, all together sounding the harmony of the cosmos. The traveler finds himself in the position of a sacrificial victim, is beheaded, and does not die.
Here we approach the experience of immortalizing that has a historical index going at least back to the ancient Egyptians and who knows how far into the paleolithicum and beyond. Bear with me, the man said. The story like all stories has its beginning in a question. And those stories with the greatest resonance have a way of turning upon the teller and erasing him and his motives from all memory. So the question of who is telling the story is very consiguiente [consequent, consequential, ensuing].
The stranger has told us how myth is both an expression of the experience of participating in immortalizing and part of a story told by an unseen other, who seems bent on obliterating us as subjects in order to involve us in some mysterious but definitely hard-felt process of transfiguration. That is why we always stand poised on the edge of myth, ready to be drawn into its depth, which flows out of eternity into time, into consciousness, into the story. The dream traveler finally saw that every man was always and eternally in the middle of his journey, whatever his years or whatever distance he had come.
At the end of the dream, the traveler explained, he walked out in the dawn and there was an encampment on the plains below which was deserted, with only a few artifacts and the bones of a prophet lying about. In a parallel to the story of Er the traveler asked the dream traveler what had happened. I have been here before. Everything here is for the taking. And then, like Er, the stranger, has a message to tell, a saving tale from a demonic place. After this long meditation on an intra-cosmic experience of immortality, the reader is taken quite off guard by its power:.
And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love the man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. The man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time comes, and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken?
Will you listen to his tale? Up until now the Epilogue has been mythic in the sense of God writing the story with whatever bits of material ranged through the unconscious of the writer. Now, suddenly, the myth becomes the fact of the Gospel, as written in the hearts and actions of actual humans, lived out where two worlds meet. But Billy just keeps moving until a family in New Mexico takes him in. The Trilogy ends with a simple and beautiful mystic insight of God like a woman yet not a woman, full of love and grace.
Billy is about ready to go to bed. Betty comes in and asks him if he wants a glass of water.
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Confession, acceptance, and grace. The ultimate measure of our consciousness and movement back to transcendence. Thus, consciousness and politics are inseparable in the Trilogy because consciousness shapes our ability to discern order from disorder in the world. This is not to say that Cormac McCarthy is a political philosopher.
The language of the philosopher will be the language of philosophy. The language of the artist will be whatever symbols and forms he uses to articulate his experience. And both philosopher and artist myth maker will have help form the divine muse, as Homer makes clear in the first line of Iliad: The Trilogy can be an evocation of political order because it is mythopoesis. Myth suggests that what is peculiarly human is the ability to speak to one another, in full consciousness of mortality, about participation in the story engendered by the mystery and the question.
Politics, as a human concern, is the process of people living together in their attempt to participate in that mystery and question. It falls to us to weigh and sort and order these events. It is we who assemble them into the story which is us. We make not only personal stories, but also communal ones. Each of our stories must bear witness: Only the witness has power to take its measure.
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It is lived for the other only. They can be guides. What would a political order look like that allowed itself to participate in the paradox of consciousness? What semblance would it bear to the feverish movement of war, revolution, and ceaseless diversion of the past three centuries? Aristotle may have put the whole thing best when he noted that as he got older, the truth of the myth became more and more enjoyable and edifying. McCarthy has helped us to move from the obliteration of consciousness that is part of the modern kinesis to a place where we again can raise the question of our mysterious participation in a reality that brings forth the turkey and deer, the flowers and birds, the jagged rims of the world, and ultimately humanity and human consciousness.
The Border trilogy demonstrates for us how the personal truly is the political. Both the personal and political rely upon and are tied together through the paradox of consciousness — through awareness of life as an adventure in decision that takes place within the theatre of transcendence, through understanding that wisdom may sometimes be the gift of the alien and the outsider.
How does Cormac McCarthy represent life?
Look into the eyes of the she-wolf. Listen to the tale of the Mexican stranger. Vintage Books, , ; hereafter bbreviated as TC. Texas Western Press, Texas Western Press, , Cormac McCarthy and John Dewey. Accessed November 11, University of South Carolina Press, , Lilley, Cormac McCarthy Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, , Cooper, No More Heroes: Louisiana State University Press, , Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson.
New Line Cinema, The Things of God and Man: Two worlds touch here. As one of the characters in the film Magnolia put it: Our choice in such a life is whether to respond to or resist grace: They see best the interplay of the transcendent and man in life and the impossibility of pulling apart the threads of the story to analyze whose part is whose: Now the dream traveler finds himself at the intersection of the paradox of determination and free will, thing-reality and It-reality: The problem is that your question is the very question upon which the story hangs.
After this long meditation on an intra-cosmic experience of immortality, the reader is taken quite off guard by its power: She patted his hand. Gnarled, rope scarred, speckled from the sun and years of it. The ropy veins that bound them to his heart. There was map enough for men to read. To make a world. She rose to go. Parham, I know who you are.
Ken Wilber - Wikipedia
And I do know why. You go to sleep now. Written by Margaret Hrezo and Nick Pappas. Cormac McCarthy Margaret S. The New Tribalism of the Electric Age. Toward the Light or Toward Darkness: Moral Trajectories in Conrad and McCarthy. Gardening and Nobility in Tolkien. Freud considered mystical realization to be a regression to infantile oceanic states. Wilber alleges that Freud thus commits a fallacy of reduction.
Wilber thinks that Jung commits the converse form of the same mistake by considering pre-rational myths to reflect divine realizations. Likewise, pre-rational states may be misidentified as post-rational states. Wilber describes the current state of the "hard" sciences as limited to "narrow science", which only allows evidence from the lowest realm of consciousness, the sensorimotor the five senses and their extensions. Wilber sees science in the broad sense as characterized by involving three steps: What Wilber calls "broad science" would include evidence from logic , mathematics , and from the symbolic , hermeneutical , and other realms of consciousness.
Ultimately and ideally, broad science would include the testimony of meditators and spiritual practitioners. Wilber's own conception of science includes both narrow science and broad science, e. According to Wilber's theory, narrow science trumps narrow religion, but broad science trumps narrow science. That is, the natural sciences provide a more inclusive, accurate account of reality than any of the particular exoteric religious traditions.
But an integral approach that uses intersubjectivity to evaluate both religious claims and scientific claims will give a more complete account of reality than narrow science. Wilber has referred to Stuart Kauffman , Ilya Prigogine , Alfred North Whitehead , and others in order to articulate his vitalistic and teleological understanding of reality, which is deeply at odds with the modern evolutionary synthesis. In , at the launch of the Integral Spiritual Center, a branch of the Integral Institute , Wilber presented a page rough draft summary of his two forthcoming books.
In , he published "Integral Spirituality", in which he elaborated on these ideas, as well as others such as Integral Methodological Pluralism and the developmental conveyor belt of religion. It is a grid with sequential states of consciousness on the x axis from left to right and with developmental structures, or levels , of consciousness on the y axis from bottom to top. This lattice illustrates how each structure of consciousness interprets experiences of different states of consciousness, including mystical states, in different ways.
Wilber attracted a lot of controversy from to the present day by supporting Marc Gafni. Gafni was accused in the media of sexually assaulting a minor. Wilber's philosophy has been influenced by Madhyamaka Buddhism , particularly as articulated in the philosophy of Nagarjuna. Wilber has on several occasions singled out Adi Da 's work for the highest praise while expressing reservations about Adi Da as a teacher. While Wilber has practised Buddhist meditation methods, he does not identify himself as a Buddhist. There is a growing movement that considers Wilber as following a long tradition of western psychologists that have liberally appropriated and repackaged Eastern, especially Hindu, thought.
According to Frank Visser, Wilber's conception of four quadrants, or dimensions of existence is very similar to E. Schumacher 's conception of four fields of knowledge. Wilber has been categorized as New Age due to his emphasis on a transpersonal view [40] and, more recently, as a philosopher. Wilber is credited with broadening the appeal of a "perennial philosophy" to a much wider audience. Steve McIntosh praises Wilber's work but also argues that Wilber fails to distinguish "philosophy" from his own Vedantic and Buddhist religion.
Psychiatrist Stanislav Grof has praised Wilber's knowledge and work in the highest terms; [53] however, Grof has criticized the omission of the pre- and peri-natal domains from Wilber's spectrum of consciousness, and Wilber's neglect of the psychological importance of biological birth and death.
Ken has produced an extraordinary work of highly creative synthesis of data drawn from a vast variety of areas and disciplines His knowledge of the literature is truly encyclopedic, his analytical mind systematic and incisive, and the clarity of his logic remarkable. The impressive scope, comprehensive nature, and intellectual rigor of Ken's work have helped to make it a widely acclaimed and highly influential theory of transpersonal psychology. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Ken Wilber Wilber with Bernard Glassman background.
Integral theory Ken Wilber. Because they all tell variations on the same story, don't they? The story of awakening one morning and discovering you are one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and infinite fashion. Yes, maybe they are crazy, these divine fools. Maybe they are mumbling idiots in the face of the Abyss. Maybe they need a nice, understanding therapist. Yes, I'm sure that would help. But then, I wonder. Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace.
And in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, just maybe, an individual's consciousness does indeed touch infinity—a total embrace of the entire Kosmos—a Kosmic consciousness that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature. It's at least plausible. Stuart Kaufman [ sic ] and many others have criticized mere change and natural selection as not adequate to account for this emergence he sees the necessity of adding self-organization. Of course I understand that natural selection is not acting on mere randomness or chance—because natural selection saves previous selections, and this reduces dramatically the probability that higher, adequate forms will emerge.
But even that is not enough, in my opinion, to account for the remarkable emergence of some of the extraordinarily complex forms that nature has produced. After all, from the big bang and dirt to the poems of William Shakespeare is quite a distance, and many philosophers of science agree that mere chance and selection are just not adequate to account for these remarkable emergences.
The universe is slightly tilted toward self-organizing processes, and these processes—as Prigogine was the first to elaborate—escape present-level turmoil by jumping to higher levels of self-organization, and I see that "pressure" as operating throughout the physiosphere, the biosphere, and the noosphere. And that is what I metaphorically mean when I use the example of a wing or elsewhere, the example of an eyeball to indicate the remarkableness of increasing emergence.
But I don't mean that as a specific model or actual example of how biological emergence works! Spirituality portal Philosophy portal. Conventional truth is the truth of phenomenal appearances and causal relations, our daily common-sense world. Ultimate truth is the recognition that no-"thing" exists inherently; every-"thing" is empty, sunyata of an unchanging "essence". It also means that there is no unchanging transcendental reality underlying phenomenal existence. See also Perennialism versus constructionism. Forman, A guide to integral psychotherapy: Archived from the original on New Heaven New Earth.
Archived from the original on 24 July Retrieved 26 May Wilber's statement about his health". Archived from the original on 5 June Archived from the original on December 23, Retrieved December 26, Many of the enduring perennial philosophers—such as Nagarjuna —were already using postmetaphysical methods, which is why their insights are still quite valid. But the vast majority of perennial philosophers were caught in metaphysical, not critical, thought, which is why I reject their methods almost entirely, and accept their conclusions only to the extent they can be reconstructed" "Archived copy".
The Eye of Spirit.