A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber

Author:Ken Wilber [Wilber, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General
ISBN: 9781590304501
Google: c9shMX7HLY0C
Amazon: 1570627401
Goodreads: 177132
Publisher: Shambhala
Published: 1996-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

184 兩 A Brief History of Everything

q: A few examples, perhaps.

kw: At the psychic level, a person might temporarily dissolve the

separate-self sense (the ego or centaur) and find an identity with the

entire gross or sensorimotor world—so-called nature mysticism. You’re on a nice nature walk, relaxed and expansive in your awareness, and

you look at a beautiful mountain, and wham!—suddenly there is no

looker, just the mountain—and you are the mountain. You are not in

here looking at the mountain out there. There is just the mountain, and

it seems to see itself, or you seem to be seeing it from within. The mountain is closer to you than your own skin.

By any other terms, there is no separation between subject and object,

between you and the entire natural world ‘‘out there.’’ Inside and out-

side—they don’t have any meaning anymore. You can still tell perfectly

well where your body stops and the environment begins—this is not

psychotic adualism or a ‘‘resurrection in mature form’’ of psychotic adu-

alism. It is your own higher Self at this stage—fulcrum-7—which can be

called the Eco-Noetic Self; some call it the Over-Soul or the World Soul.

This is the fusion phase of fulcrum-7. You are a ‘‘nature mystic.’’

q: But this seems like such an abrupt switch—from the individual

centaur to an identity with all of nature, as it were. I don’t see the

smooth evolutionary progression here.

kw: Actually, it’s not much of a jump at all. I think people get con-

fused because we say identity moves from the ‘‘individual’’ bodymind to

the ‘‘whole world,’’ which does indeed look rather abrupt.

But that’s not what happens. Look at what is actually involved. At

the worldcentric centaur, one’s awareness has already moved from an identity with the material dimension (fulcrum-1) to an identity with the

biological dimension (fulcrum-2) to an identity with a mental self (ful-

crum-3). That early mental self, like the previous two fulcrums, is very

egocentric and narcissistic.

But with fulcrum-4, identity switches from egocentric to sociocentric.

Here your awareness already transcends its merely individual aspects.

Your very awareness, your very identity, is based upon cultural roles and collective identities and shared values. It is no longer a body identity, it is a role identity.

Thus, when you say, I am a father, I am a mother, I am a husband, I

am a wife, I work at this job, I value this goal—those are already trans-

body identities. Those already move beyond the individual body and its

sensations, and into a circle of intersubjective roles and values and goals.

Most of the items that you call your ‘‘self’’ are not egocentric at all, but

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CH12

11-04-16 13:42:15

PS

Realms of the Superconscious: Part 1 兩 185

cultural and sociocentric. When you feel your ‘‘self,’’ you are actually

feeling a circle of intersubjective events, and you exist in that cultural circle, you do not exist merely inside your skin. You have decentered,

transcended, a merely body-bound identity. You can’t even think who

you are without existing in this cultural circle, and that circle already goes way beyond your skin boundary!

With rationality and fulcrum-5, your identity decenters or expands

once again, this time transcending any merely ethnocentric or sociocen-

tric identity, and finding instead a postconventional or worldcentric

identity.

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