The Marriage of Sense and Soul by Ken Wilber

Author:Ken Wilber [Wilber, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-79956-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

THE GLORY OF THE VISION

This, truly, was a stunning vision, the likes of which humankind has rarely seen: evolution as Spirit’s temporal unfolding of its own timeless potentials. Grounded in the pragmatic facts and actual history of consciousness, yet at the same time wedded to an all-pervading spiritual reality glorious in its grace and grand in its splendor, this Idealist vision brought Heaven down to awaken the Earth and brought Earth up to exalt its Heaven.

Idealism came very close to integrating the Big Three. There was abundant room for art, morals, and science, and they were carefully seen as important and cherished moments in the overall process of Spirit itself. Moreover, the Idealist vision was alive to the currents of development (or evolution). It was the first philosophy ever to come to terms with—and fully embrace—the sweeping implications of all-encompassing development, especially in religion and spirituality. Moreover, Idealism integrated Spirit and evolution in perhaps the only convincing way, namely, by recognizing that evolution is simply Spirit-in-action, or “God in the making.”

Thus evolution, far from being an antispiritual movement—as so many Romantics and antimodernists and virtually all premodern cultures imagined—is actually the concrete unfolding, holarchical integration, and self-actualization of Spirit itself. Evolution is the mode and manner of Spirit’s creation of the entire manifest world, not one item of which is left untouched by its all-encompassing embrace.

Henceforth, any spirituality that did not embrace evolution was doomed to extinction. Modern science, after the collapse, would reject the spiritual nature of evolution but retain the notion of evolution itself. Modern science, that is, would give us the exteriors of evolution—its surfaces and forms—but not its interiors—including Spirit itself. But even science would realize that evolution is universal, touching everything in existence, and, as Daniel Dennett put it, “like ‘universal acid,’ evolution eats through every other explanation for life, mind, and culture.” How could it not, when it is actually Spirit-in-action, and Spirit embraces all?

Even though modern science has rejected the interiors of evolution while retaining the exterior surfaces, nonetheless science has amassed so much evidence for the existence of evolution in general that, to this day, any religion that attempts to reject evolution seals its own fate in the modern world. Even Pope John Paul II finally conceded that “evolution is more than a hypothesis.”

One of the crucial ingredients in any integration of science and religion is the integration of empirical evolution with transcendental Spirit. The Idealists hit upon what very well might be the only conceivable way that this particular requirement can be met, namely, by seeing evolution as Spirit-in-action, thus accounting not only for the what and when of evolution (the empirical forms and Right-Hand surfaces accepted by modern science) but the why and how as well (the Left-Hand depths and interior intentionality of Spirit-in-action).

This extraordinary insight is to Idealism’s everlasting credit. This lustrous vision saw the entire universe—atoms to cells to organisms to societies, cultures, minds, and souls—as the radiant unfolding of a luminous Spirit, bright and brilliant in its way, never-ending in its liberating grace.

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