I’ve enjoyed the controversy surrounding the Ken Wilber camp over the past few years. Some people worship Wilber, others can neither tolerate his personality nor his work. Situations like this breed attachment and attachment always leads to interesting situations.

As far as I’m concerned, Wilber has had a significant impact on both the pedagogy and curricular content of what I do as a teacher. And while, like the rest of us, he has had his difficulties, I don’t feel it’s my place to offer any judgement about the man. I do think, however, that thoughtfully considering some aspects of the debate surrounding him will serve practitioners well.

Here are two points of interest:

First, a video critique offered by Frank Visser (thanks ~C4Chaos), then a follow-up by Sean Esbjorn-Hargens.

So often we can get caught by our preferences; especially those surrounding tradition. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing since our preferences are what lead us into a practice in the first place. But what I’ve noticed in myself, my teachers, and my students is that satori is such a necessary and yet partial pointer. While Emptiness might express itself identically, it’s interpretation is entirely bound by all sorts of other things like culture, history, gender, and identity.

I talk about this in Chapter 7:

For example, getting to the mountaintop and taking in the view most certainly does not resolve everything about us into a timeless state of perfection. Confusion and harm can result if this perspective simply reasserts the small self sense of “I’m Awake, but those people don’t have a clue.” Living from this place is a life still divided, and a life divided is a life of delusion. In order for any view from the summit to support a life of unity, our practice must align itself with a purposeful integrity.

And this alignment is crucial if there is to be any traction for realization.

A recent Holons piece covers Diane Musho Hamilton’s take:

Consider this: just about anyone is capable of having an experience of mystical union with the world around them, prompting them to say the following six deceptively simple words: “I am one with the world.”  But these same six words can carry acutely divergent meanings from person to person—after all, who is the “I” that is making the statement, and which world are you feeling at one with?  The fundamentalist world as strictly written and interpreted by the book and believers of the “one true faith”?  The physical world of atoms, molecules, and squishy machinery of biology?  The planet itself, as a single interconnected “web of life” threading us all together?  There is not a single, pre-given world “out there” that we can experience spiritual communion with, but a succession of worldviews that can only be perceived by the stages of consciousness capable of enacting them.

To be sure, it continues:

Enlightenment is not a static experience—though the empty side of the street may ultimately remain unchanged, the nondual union of form and emptiness is an endlessly moving target, as the manifest world perpetually twists, billows, and slides across the effortless lens of eternity, with new and novel perspectives being born every moment.

Hear a segment from a deeper discussion that Hamilton Sensei has with Ken Wilber.