Beschrijving
Titel: Atman Project Auteur: Ken Wilber ISBN: 9780835605328 Conditie: Used Wilber traces human development from infancy into adulthood and beyond, into those states described by mystics and spiritual adepts. The spiritual evolution of such extraordinary individuals as the Buddha and Jesus hints at the direction human beings will take in their continuing growth toward transcendence. Everywhere we look in nature, said the philosopher Jan Smuts, we see nothing but wholes.*** And not just simple wholes, but hierarchical ones: each whole is a part of a larger whole which is itself a part of a larger whole. Fields within fields within fields, stretching through the cosmos, interlacing each and every thing with each and every other. Further, said Smuts, the universe is not a thoughtlessly static and inert whole—the cosmos is not lazy, but energetically dynamic and even creative. It tends (we would now say teleonomically, not teleologically) to produce higherand higher-level wholes, evermore inclusive and organized. This overall cosmic process, as it unfolds in time, is nothing other than evolution. And the drive to ever-higher unities, Smuts called halism. If we continued this line of thinking, we might say that because the human mind or psyche is an aspect of the cosmos, we would expect to find, in the psyche itself, the same hierarchical arrangement of wholes within wholes, reaching from the simplest and most rudimentary to the most complex and inclusive. In general, such is exactly the discovery of modern psychology. As Werner put it, “Wherever development occurs it proceeds from a state of relative globality and lack of differentiation to a state of increasing differentiation, articulation, and hierarchical integration." Jakobson speaks of “those stratified phenomena which modern psychology uncovers in the different areas of the realm of the mind,’'!®* where each stratified layer is more integrated and more encompassing than its predecessor. Bateson points out that even learning itself is hierarchical, involving several major levels, each of which is “meta-" to its predecessor.** As a general approximation, then, we may conclude that the psyche—like the cosmos at large—is many-layered (“pluridimensional’), composed of successively higher-order wholes and unities and integrations. The holistic evolution of nature—which produces everywhere higher and higher wholes—shows up in the human psyche as develoment or growth. The same force that produced man from amoebe, produces adults from infants. That is, a person 's growth, from infans to adulthood, is simply a miniature version of cosmic evolution. Qp we might say, psychological growth or development in humans simply a microcosmic reflection of universal growth on the whole, an has the same goal: the unfolding of ever higher-order unities and inte, grations. And this is one of the major reasons that the peyche à indeed, stratified. Very like the geological formation of the eert) psychological development proceeds, stratum by stratum, level b level, stage by stage, with each successive level superimposed upon ib predecessor in such a way that it includes but transcends it (“enve) ops it,” as Werner would say). Now in psychological development, the whole of any level becomen merely a part of the whole of the next level, which in turn becomes 4 part of the next whole, and so on throughout the evolution of con. sciousness. Take, as but one example, the development of language: the child first learns babbling sounds, then wider vowel and consonant sounds, then simple wo
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