Sri Aurobindo provides not just theory, but a practical Yoga of not just transcendence but transmutation as well

alan kazlev Says: March 22nd, 2007 at 5:50 pm It is true KW includes meditation, but let’s “deconstruct” this. Wilber’s concept of meditation, enlightenment, spirituality etc is based on what he has learned from Adi Da, Advaita, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism; all of which teach a nondual level of attainment equivalent to the the starting point of Integral Yoga. Ken’s perspective regarding enlightenment is therefore limited because it is still based on the old “yoga of ascent”, not the new yoga of descent. This is not to say he is wrong, only, to use his own words, he has is partial, he has a partial truth, not the whole picture. The Aurobinbonian perspective transcends and includes the Wilberian, but not vice-versa. It is therefore impossible, that’s right, impossible, for KW to accurately critique Sri Aurobindo. In his own terminology, the lower holon cannot apprecuate the higher.

I have already disscussed all this on Integral World, and so far not one person has been able to refute the arguments in that particular section of my essay. If you say this is just my relative perspective, I would ask you to read Aurobindo in the original, not just read but deeply meditate and contemnplate and attune to that spiritual transmission, and then come to your own conclusions. Without accessing the source, it is nothing but mental relativism. Moreover, KW either has no conception of occultism or magic (beyond his misunderstanding of it as being an archaic magical stage that precedes the rational formop etc), or if he has he has not mentioned it in any of his thousands of pages. And obviously, Wilber has no conception of supramentalisation, or if he has he says the literal opposite in his voluminous writings.

Unless one has read Sri Aurobindo in the original, read Gebser, and for that matter read The Mother (who Wilber never once mentions, despite her close co-working with Sri Aurobindo), read Teilhard, and read William Irwin Thompson in the original, how can one understand, appreciate, or critique, these and other visionaries? Or arrive at an Integral worldview that is not slanted to the Wilberian? Of course, I have equally not read Derrida. We are limited by our partial interests, and from that poiont of view I agree with you. But to reduce Wilber and Aurobindo to the same level can at best arrive at a soppy ecumenicalism where everyone is respected and everyone is equal.

imho (and this is only my own biased opinion) your EI, which is based on your own mental conceptions, which in turn can be deconstructed to their Wilberian and Derridian roots. So it reflects your own pov, which is fair enough, it is a valid perspective, one among many. But it cannot serve as a meta-explanation, because it is still based on the relativism of the rational-mental-perspectival approach. My thesis is that it is indeed possible to transcend this sort of relativism, but that requires profound spiritual experience and gnosis. Once one has passed beyond words and relative-mental foremations, one realises the limitations of all these theoretical approaches. Thus Sri Aurobindo provides not just theory, but a practical Yoga of not just transcendence but transmutation as well. This Yoga truly begins where all the others end, at Enlightenment. But Enlightenment itself is still far beyond relativism.