A Question for Integral Theory and Spiral Dynamics

[Oeaohoo]

‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.’

- Opening stanza of The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats.

With these evocative lines, Yeats describes the progress of time as a centrifugal spiralling outwards from an original source or principle. Once this process of manifestation has reached the point at which the original principle can no longer sustain it, the centre cannot hold and everything collapses back into its source.

This is more or less exactly the testimony that all of the world’s traditions laid down regarding the anatomy of time, history and becoming. These testimonies were described not by crusty dogmatic theologians clinging to a distant and unretrievable past but by those who were known as: rishi (“seer”), druid (dru-wid- "strong seer”), völva (“seeress”), to name but a few. They were not expressions of stale conformity and banality but were essentially visions: the vision may be described in terms that are more or less vague or precise, poetical or analytical, but the story is always the same.

A myth common to Greco-Roman antiquity, Vedic India and many other ancient civilisations describes history in terms of cycles of Four Ages: Golden Age (Satya Yuga), Silver Age (Treta Yuga), Bronze Age (Dvapara Yuga) , Iron Age (Kali Yuga). Here are some descriptions of the Kali Yuga from the Vishnu Purāna:

Quote

In the Kali age men corrupted by unbelievers will say: “Of what authority are the Vedas? What are gods or Brāhmans?”

Inner wealth and piety will decrease day by day until the whole world will be totally depraved. Then property alone will confer rank; material wealth will be the only source of devotion; passion will be the sole bond of union between the sexes; falsehood will be the only means of success in litigation.

Observance of caste, order and traditional institutions will not prevail in the Kali age. Marriages in this age will not be comformable to the ritual. 

The women will pay no attention to the commands of their husbands or parents. They will be selfish, abject and slatternly; they will be scolds and liars; they will be indecent and immoral in their conduct and will ever attach themselves to dissolute men [!].

Earth will be venerated but for its mineral treasures.

All orders of life will be common alike to all persons. Men of all degrees will conceit themselves to be equal with Brahmans.

Men will fix their desires upon riches, even though dishonestly acquired. He who gives away much money will be the master of men [!] and family descent will no longer be a title of supremacy.

You can decide whether any of this is recognisable today. Of course, it is also noted that the Dark Age may provide unique opportunities for liberation from all conditioned existence, which is after all the ultimate goal of all life down here. One might even grow a little too comfortable in the “Golden Age”!

Some other traditions do not describe the process in such detail, but the trajectory remains the same. They speak of an original purity, nobility and divinity which is gradually corrupted by covetous identification and material attachment. I will assume that one or another of the Abrahamic expressions of this truth are known to anybody reading this - Original Sin, the Fall, the Messiah, Revelations - and so offer an example from a lesser-known civilisation. In the Nordic Voluspa we find the following descriptions from a female priestess of Ragnarök (Twilight of the Gods):

Quote

I know much wisdom, I see deep in the future, all the way to Ragnarok, a dark day for the gods.

Brothers will fight one another and kill one another, cousins will break peace with one another, the world will be a hard place to live in.

It will be an age of adultery. Before the world sinks in the sea, there will be no man left who is true to another.    

All humankind will fall out of the world when Thor falls after only nine steps, struck down by the venom of the honourless serpent.

The sun turns black, the earth sinks into the sea, the bright stars fall out of the sky. Flames scorch the leaves of the World-Tree, a great bonfire reaches to the highest clouds.

I see the Earth rise a second time from out of the sea, green once more. There the gods will find once more the wonderful golden game pieces in the grass, which they had once played with in the earliest days.

This post could be indefinitely multiplied with further examples, but there is no need to belabour the point.

Original sin; the fall of man into duality; the primordial sacrifice of Being for the sake of becoming; the cycles of time and the four ages of man; the ubiquitous motif of the messiah and the eschaton. Everywhere we find the same theme and the same pattern, to such an extent that most definitions of religion require that an eschatology (literally “last-ology”, an account of the end of the present cycle of time) be present.

How is it then, that a theory which claims to “integrate” all of these traditions and religions, denies a fundamental aspect of all of them?

 

[Barna]

You're confusing different things. 

A child has a magic/mythic worldview, they later become adults with a higher perspective that integrates the child's worldview. 
But integrating the child's worldview doesn't mean that the adult still believes in Santa Claus. 

So the adult reads the prophecies, appreciates the moral of the stories, and understands the type of worldview that created the stories and why they were necessary at that time of human development. And the adult understands that these stories convey relative truths, and relative truths quickly change because our way of living changes generation by generation and tech by tech.

[Oeaohoo]

It is clear from the texts that contain these accounts that they are not intended as mere fables or stories, and as I showed above they were originally not merely believed in but seen - the need for faith and belief came later, when people lost direct contact with the truth. Isn’t it a bit of a coincidence that the wisest people of every ancient society all had the same delusional vision of the future?

I would also point out that the supposed disenchantment and relativisation of the collective worldview has actually just given birth to new forms of magic and new mythologies, which are much more insidious than the previous ones because they are no longer recognised as such. Not only that, but these new mythologies are often diabolical inversions of the truth. Isn’t the myth of ‘Progress’ just an inversion of everything I have shown above (not to deny that there might be local instances of progress)?

People still think mythologically, the only difference is that now the mythology is ridiculous.

Do you really think that people have a more adult worldview today: Disney+ for adults and grown men watching Captain Capeshit films? So many aspects of the modern (particularly American) mentality are totally infantile: the fascination with quantity and bigness, the endless pursuit of novelty and the love of speed, the solipsistic obsession with self and subjective identity; these are all traits proper to an infantile level of development.

[Oeaohoo]

All truth other than God is relative truth. The idea that a society based on relative truth alone is better than one rooted in absolute truth, from which relative truths are extrapolated to fit a given context (which was the traditional approach), is absurd. What is celebrated in these models as mankind racing towards relativism is actually just the gradual and eventually total loss of any guiding absolute principle. The distinction between relative and absolute truth is not even a modern one: Nagarjuna's Two Truths doctrine, Mahavira’s notion of Anekāntavāda, Protagoras who famously stated that “man is the measure of all things”. Even where this distinction is not made explicit it is noticeable, for example: ’For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’ The distinction between the relative truth in which distinctions exist and the absolute truth in which they all dissolve is made very clear here.

Ironically, it is these very models that fail to distinguish between relative and absolute truth. After all, it is obvious that most people need a set of relative truths to orient themselves in the world, which society and religion used to provide - now it doesn't, and most people are totally lost. A small minority might be able to leap through the void of relativism and go straight for the absolute truth, but they are few and far between.

[Barna]

Today's style of living isn't worse or more unethical than any time in the past. The wise people of ancient times were not any bit wiser than today's wisest people. 

Just look at the data: the average lifespan is longer than ever, famine is lower than ever, opportunities (even in the poorest parts of the world) are broader than ever. 

Today a child in poverty can learn to code, get a remote job and pull his whole family into the middle class.
When has this been ever a possibility in the past? 

If your life is miserable then you'll think that the whole world is doomed. Get your life together, and you'll see a completely different world.

[Oeaohoo]

"Then property alone will confer rank; material wealth will be the only source of devotion".

The data can tell you whatever you want it to. Data is just part of the reign of quantity. The very idea that the quality of life can be measured by statistical metrics and data points is exactly what was spoken of in the prophecies of the Dark Age: all qualitative criteria are lost - "inner wealth and piety", "observance of caste, order and traditional institutions", "family descent" and "authority" - and all that is left is a bunch of socialised human animals happily consigned to their safe, secure and self-satisfied existence. Bravo to progress!

40 minutes ago, Barna said:

Today a child in poverty can learn to code, get a remote job and pull his whole family into the middle class.
When has this been ever a possibility in the past? 

Besides the coding part, this has always been possible. Even African-American slaves in America could earn their freedom if they showed enough initiative. The American democratic myth of the self-made man is largely a thing of the past anyway, capital in most industries today has already been consolidated and the markets are massively over-saturated. Of course a few will always show enough initiative to find a new way to climb the ladder but I am talking here about the general course of history, not a few happy exceptions. The vast majority of people in the situation you described will fall into corruption of one sort or another: terribly paid factory work, if not scamming and get-rich-quick schemes, if not prostitution and drug or sex trafficking. "Men will fix their desires upon riches, even though dishonestly acquired." Any of these are much worse than what their vocation would have been in a religious and traditional society.

My life isn't miserable, nor was the life of the Rishis. Were the priests of every traditional society all miserable? No!

All of this is in a way besides the point. It just baffles me that anyone who has deeply and "integrally" studied so many of the world's religions could fail to notice that all of them teach exactly the opposite of modern Americanised progressivism. It is as if someone was asked to integrate ten different types of tree, and they ended up with something which had no trunk!

[Barna]

If you disregard data then you have to disregard science as well, because science is based on data. 

If you disregard science, then what kind of a tool do you use to assess the current state of society? Is it based on just the opinion of a few wise men who lived hundreds of years ago? 

You're suggesting that the world (or the average person) has degraded in the aspects that you're mentioning. But please, prove it to me that it has really degraded in those aspects. I'm curious. 

If you can't prove it, then you have to be open to the possibility that it might not be true.
And then I have a question for you: why do you choose to have a pessimistic worldview? Is it useful for you in any way? Do you feel superior to the rest of humanity? Or why do you choose to believe it? 

[Oeaohoo]

I'm suggesting that more or less everybody in the world prior to 500 years ago believed that history was a process of decay. I find the fact that this is so smugly and simply brushed away today by almost everybody very interesting.

Why do you insist on psychologising everything? Who cares why I believe it or what the effect of believing it is? I can tell you why. Because the new myth is psychology. The new myth insists on explaining the higher in terms of the lower: man is merely a sophisticated ape, matter is superior to mind and all beliefs emerge from unresolved "subconscious complexes". The new myth is pragmatism: beliefs only matter because of the effect they have in the world. The new myth is empiricism: beliefs only matter if you can "prove" them "objectively". The new myth is science, data and "facts". The new myth is progress, evolution, and - in extreme cases - spiral dynamics and integral theory. Mankind has not moved beyond a mythic worldview, so what is the justification for writing off the myths of the past?

[Barna]

5 minutes ago, Oeaohoo said:

I'm suggesting that more or less everybody in the world prior to 500 years ago believed that history was a process of decay. I find the fact that this is so smugly and simply brushed away today by almost everybody very interesting.

Imagine that you're a carpenter a thousand years ago. Once you finish your work, it starts to decay. 
Imagine that you're a leatherman a thousand years ago. Once you finish your work, it starts to decay. 
Imagine that you're anyone a thousand years ago. How can you even think in terms of progress, if you don't have technologies, nothing really improves, and every work you make always decays? 
It was a different culture simply because it had different ways of living. 

A hundred years ago women were still not allowed to drive or vote.
A few hundred years ago most rich men had slaves. That's how ethical their culture was. 
A thousand years ago people were carrying swords with them everywhere. That's how "safe" a city was. That's how "developed" the average person was. 

Imagine how would you look today at a person who's carrying a gun in Walmart. A thousand years ago that was everyday life.

Why do you want to believe so badly that the ancients were such wise people? 

[Oeaohoo]

Imagine you're drinking from a plastic water bottle today. Once you finish drinking from it, it is sent off to float around in some ocean for millions of years. How is that any better? Zen monks used to build sand mandalas then immediately destroy them to remind themselves of the impermanence of all things down here; modern people surround themselves with long-lasting things which give them a false illusion of permanence, a false illusion which dulls their desire for the only real permanence which is transcendence.

In the rest, you are just appealing to the historical aspect of the modern myth: a "history" in which all that has ever happened is slavery, oppression of women, the Holocaust and civil rights. This historical myth is one of the stilts that is used to prop up this false ideology of progress. Look at any non-material metric of life and you will see that our present, "advanced" and "evolved" civilisation is a farce and a sham. The involutional view of history doesn't even deny that life might get "better" in a very flimsy and shallow way, safer and more comfortable, but who cares about this? The real point of life is to transcend life.

A society which puts safety, comfort and conformity as its highest values is a deeply sick society. As far as woman and slaves are concerned, let us recall Aristotle's prescient phrase: 'The evil practices of the worst and final form of democracy are all characteristic of tyranny. Dominance of women in the household in the hope that they may inform against their husbands, and license towards slaves in order that they may betray their masters. Slaves and women do not conspire against tyrants, and they are of course friendly both to tyrannies and also to democracies, since under them they have a good time. For the common people too would fain be a monarch.'

Besides, I would much rather be a slave helping to build the Egyptian pyramids than a "free man" flipping burgers at McDonalds.

Why do you want believe so badly that the moderns are such wise people? You prefer to side with French and American revolutionaries, Marx and Engels, Martin Luther King, and some mediocre American compiler of other people's thoughts who thinks he is a philosopher because he knows that "stereotypes are true but partial" (Ken Wilber) than the enlightened sages of antiquity (and even some of the present)? The former are the only people in history to preach "progress". Suit yourself.

[Barna]

5 minutes ago, Oeaohoo said:

Besides, I would much rather be a slave helping to build the Egyptian pyramids than a "free man" flipping burgers at McDonalds.

You can do so. You can choose any kind of life you want, that's the beauty of this century. You can be offline, off the grid, away from everything. You can live like a monk and no one will raid your village. 
But don't expect anyone to follow you. Enlightenment is not for the masses. Most people just want to explore happiness on their own terms. 

[Oeaohoo]

Just more progressive myths. "You can choose any kind of life you want, so long as it's compatible with the invasive and contaminating ideology of neoliberal Globohomo mass democracy! WOO HOO!"

[Barna]

Every century has its own difficulties. Getting what you want out of it is a test of your intelligence. 

In my opinion, if you can't get what you want today, then you wouldn't be able to get that at any other time in history.

Edited May 30, 2022 by Barna

[Oeaohoo]

Sorry if I was a little rude, I was underslept yesterday.

I sort-of agree with you that most people just want to explore happiness on their own terms (with the exception that, for most people today, “their own terms” aren’t really their own terms but have been determined by the new forms of magic, advertising and mass media). This is part of the point here.

The postmodern world forces very advanced truths on people who aren’t ready for them.

The fact that nothing is really true and that all truth other than God is relative was always known, but it was obvious to the wise of the past that for most people this knowledge is very dangerous. The trouble is that nowadays everybody more or less knows that nothing is true and everything is permitted but they haven’t been through the process of inner purification that was provided by the context of initiation and asceticism, so their freedom in almost all cases is just licentiousness.

13 hours ago, Barna said:

You can do so. You can choose any kind of life you want, that's the beauty of this century. You can be offline, off the grid, away from everything. You can live like a monk and no one will raid your village. 

There are a panoply of examples of this not being the case: tell that to the Tibetan monks who had their society destroyed by communist China, or all the monasteries and abbeys that were destroyed in my country by Protestant proto-progressives, or all of the Muslims who have been killed because they refuse to comply with “modern values”. This is the paradox of liberalism: the only way it can maintain safety and order is by destroying or consuming everything other than itself. Then it goes around talking about how “tolerant”, “inclusive” and “democratic” it is. What a joke!

(Obviously, in criticising democracy and liberalism I’m not suggesting anybody join some anti-liberal anti-democratic movement. All of the ideologies and political programs - fascism and communism particularly - that claim to be against democracy really just exist in a dialectical relationship with it. They share more or less the same underlying values.)

It doesn’t matter what I want or whether I get it. I am talking about what is true. Don’t you believe it is possible for people to transcend their limited human perspective and care about what is actually true? Isn’t that what “stage yellow” and “second tier” thinking is all about?

Edited May 31, 2022 by Oeaohoo

[Oeaohoo]

As far as proving that the real quality of life - that is to say, the quality of life as a means towards liberation from life (which might not exclude integration into the world) - has gradually deteriorated over the years, there are various ways we could go about this.

Firstly, a simple observation: If every stage is more advanced than the last, then why is every stage shorter? Stage Red lasted for thousands of years, Stage Blue for over a thousand, Stage Orange for under 500, and Stage Green has so far only lasted under 100 years (and it already seems pretty strained)? Isn’t longevity a sign of peace, order and stability, and frantic activism a sign of disorder and chaos? And if every stage is getting shorter, then logically there must be an end of the cycle! (Or “third tier” stages will only last for an infinitesimal duration!)

On this note, maybe you could try the Actualised method: contemplate the nature of history with the possible aid of an unspecified substance. Questions could include: “If God is already truth and love, why does the world exist?”; “If God is already infinite, why would it need to progress?“; “If God is Being, why would it need to become anything?” I would also ask you now: how could the higher come from the lower, the expansive and all-encompassing from the narrow and finite? After all, this is the implicit claim of all ideas of progress and evolution.

Now we get to data. The other problem I have with any argument based on data is that data only means anything within the context of more data, thus relying on data can lead you down an infinite vortex of mere information. This is a trap.

That being said, there is much evidence to suggest that people have grown stupider and weaker over time: IQ levels (I am quite against the idea of IQ, but it is still a somewhat meaningful measure) have decreased and testosterone levels are rapidly decreasing. The world today is an extremely toxic physical environment, many people’s neurological (and even spiritual) function is impaired by exposure to micro-plastics and heavy metals.

True there have been some advances in profane medicine (though traditional forms of healing have been mostly forgotten or survived in more or less counterfeit forms), but almost all of these come with serious drawbacks. The only area of medicine in which I would be willing to concede advances which don’t have many drawbacks is emergency medicine. On the whole, modern medicine has only served to artificially prop up a lazy and entitled population of mass obesity and senility, requiring even further false support from cheap foreign labour and recently the “locking down” of society itself (this is not intended as a criticism of Covid restrictions per se).

Besides, death is a reminder to the living of the importance of life. And what of the total loss of all after-death practice? The traditional societies which have left us the Tibetan and Egyptian “Books of the Dead” would likely be appalled at the total lack of support that profane society provides for the soul in its journey back to God. 

Another way I could attempt to prove the truth of the traditional description of history would be to compare cultural artefacts of the past with those of today. The trouble with this is that most cultural artefacts are products of one or another given phase of a civilisation, and thus don’t necessary reflect any broader pattern. For example, it is very easy to see that postmodern brutalist architecture is very much inferior to a Christian cathedral, but that could just be because postmodernism represents a local minima as the decline of the Christian West. Another problem I have with this is that outward manifestations of culture are not what is really essential. Like the text I originally quoted says, today people are outwardly wealthy (excluding many very notable exceptions) but inwardly malnourished.

Regardless of all this, there are no brutalist monstrosities lingering around today from ancient times. Then again, that could just be because they aren't exactly built to last... And isn't that in its own way another proof: nobody today builds anything to last, there is no faith in the future anymore. That is why instant gratification and social media have found their perfect host-body in the postmodern mass man. This is why more people today are addicted to opiates and hyper-stimulant drugs than ever before, to say nothing of the indefinite number of more trivial addictions which are rife today.

When in human history have there been more school shootings and utterly useless and instantly forgotten outbursts of violence than in postmodern America? Violence in the ancient world was often not a merely profane activity; it took on a profound, heroic and even ascetic function. This can be seen not just in the Abrahamic doctrine of Holy War but in many older traditions. Most violence and conflict today is gratuitous and pointless.

Anyway - given that these are all rather superficial forms of proof, I’d be interested to hear any retort you might have or additional domains in which you think progress has occurred (but please no appeals to fake freedom and artificial egalitarianism!). 

[Oeaohoo]

As far why I believe it? I experience it to be true in a way that is hard to articulate. I will grant that this could just be an illusion from having studied many texts of this sort, but it seems very real to me (as real as anything else, that is!)

As far as what effect this has? Of course it is necessary to balance a clear eyed assessment of reality with the possibility of pointless gloominess and pessimism: all of this could be used merely as an excuse to justify pessimism and hopelessness, which might all just be inspired by a specific personal or even collective predicament having little to do with any overarching pattern. One should also never be fatalistic or deterministic. Incidentally, this is all illustrated in Nordic mythology by the figure of Odin, who studies and toils relentlessly to prevent the inevitable Twilight of the Gods. Also, certain aspects of the Hindu doctrine of Yugas were kept relatively secret (particularly regarding anything that allowed an application in terms of “divination” or an immediate prophecy of current events), and it was probably for this reason.

[Carl-Richard]

On 29.5.2022 at 11:55 PM, Oeaohoo said:

How is it then, that a theory which claims to “integrate” all of these traditions and religions, denies a fundamental aspect of all of them?

Eschatology goes right under the intersubjective quadrant.

[Oeaohoo]

I don’t deny that the integral model might find a way to explain away eschatology, but what does simply calling it “intersubjective” change? As an example, if I said to you that society denies outsiders, you could say: no it doesn’t, they fall under the “rejected” category. It still denies them! After all, “progress” belongs to the intersubjective category too. Why choose one intersubjective belief over another?

[Oeaohoo]

It is interesting to consider why the intersubjective belief has changed though. Do you know how these models explain that? Earlier stages value the wisdom of the elders and tradition while later stages (such as ours) value teenage rebellion and youthful exuberance; therefore the former value the past and the latter value the future?

A problem I see with the model in the picture you attached is that it consumes everything into itself and thus denies the reality of anything being true outside of a given cultural context, probably because Wilber is more or less a product of postmodern relativism. You could say that the whole purpose of integral theory is to include everything within itself, but that isn’t exactly what I mean: describing how all human belief systems fit within a given cultural context tells you nothing about the truth or falsity, the value or disvalue, of any given context.

Edited May 31, 2022 by Oeaohoo

[Carl-Richard]

1 hour ago, Oeaohoo said:

I don’t deny that the integral model might find a way to explain away eschatology, but what does simply calling it “intersubjective” change? As an example, if I said to you that society denies outsiders, you could say: no it doesn’t, they fall under the “rejected” category. It still denies them! After all, “progress” belongs to the intersubjective category too. Why choose one intersubjective belief over another?

I think you're expecting a bit much of the model in terms of what specific things it can tell you. It's not a very specific model. It gives a very broad and general overview, and you lose some details in the process (there's a trade-off in choosing a particular level of analysis; specificity vs. generalizability). Its purpose is metatheoretical in that it places already very wide categories into an even wider context. Eschatology seems to be a rather narrow category in this context.