With Aurobindo he goes beyond Schelling

The key integrating Enlightenment figure is Schelling, who well understood the necessity of differentiating mind and nature but saw that the transcendental and unifying ground of both had been forgotten. He goes further by insisting that Spirit is the only reality: 'Spirit descends into manifestation, but this manifestation is nevertheless Spirit itself, a form or expression of Spirit itself'. Nature is 'God-in-the-making', the processes of nature are themselves spiritual processes expressing the drive of Spirit toward Spirit in which Eros is the driving force or Spirit-in-action. Each stage of development 'is thus Spirit's knowledge of itself throught the structures (and limitations) of that stage' (p. 487).

Wilber sums this up by stating that 'Spirit knows itself objectively as nature; knows itself subjectively as mind; and knows itself absolutely as Spirit--the Source, the Summit and the Eros of the entire sequence'. With Aurobindo he goes beyond Schelling in his understanding of the transcendence of the mind itself through the creative emergence of non-dual consciousness which is both its source and goal. It is a process which, as he says, goes from pre-personal to personal to transpersonal, from bisophere to noosphere to theosphere, from subconscious to self-conscious to superconscious. This dialectic was misunderstood by Schelling's pupil, Hegel, and was not pursued to its logical conclusion by Idealism.

Wilber suggests that the failure of Idealism was due to the fact that it provided no transpersonal practice or injunctions consonant with its insights and because it burdened reason with a task it could never carry. This part of the book is the clearest and most succinct account of the evolution of consciousness which I know, and will appeal to anyone trying to formulate a constructive postmodern world-view. Review of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality from Network From Network, August 1996 No 61, pp. 76-78