Sex, Ecology & Spirituality

Sex, Ecology, & Spirituality By Ken Wilber Introduction BOOK ONE 1 The Web of Life 2 The Pattern That Connects 3 Individual and Social 4 A View from Within 5 The Emergence of Human Nature 6 Magic, Mythic, and Beyond 7 The Further Reaches of Human Nature 8 The Depths of the Divine BOOK TWO 9 The Way Up Is the Way Down 10 This-Worldly, Otherworldly 11 Brave New World 12 The Collapse of the Kosmos13 The Dominance of the Descenders 14 The Unpacking of God References Credits

Introduction is FLAT-OUT strange that something—that anything—is happening at all. There was nothing, then a Big Bang, then here we all are. This is extremely weird. To Schelling's burning question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?," there have always been two general answers. The first might be called thephilosophy of
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"oops." The universe just occurs, there is nothing behind it, it's all ultimately accidental or random, it just is, it just happens—oops! The philosophy of oops, no matter how sophisticated and adult it may on occasion appear—its modern nam es and numbers are legion, from positivism to scientific materialism, from linguistic analysis to historical materialism, from naturalismto empiricism—always comes down to the same basic answer, namely, "Don't ask." The question itself (Why is anything at all happening? Why am I here?)—the question itself is said to be confused, pathological, nonsensical, or infantile. To stop asking such silly or confused questions is, they all maintain, the mark of maturity, the sign of growing up in this cosmos. I don't think so. I think the"answer" these "modern and mature" disciplines give— namely, oops! (and therefore, "Don't ask!")—is about as infantile a response as the human condition could possibly offer. The other broad answer that has been tendered is that something else is going on: behind the happenstance drama is a deeper or higher or wider pattern, or order, or intelligence. There are, of course, many varieties of this"Deeper Order": the Tao, God, Geist, Maat, Archetypal Forms, Reason, Li, Mahamaya, Brahman, Rigpa. And although these different varieties of the Deeper Order certainly disagree with each other at many points, they all agree on this: the universe is not what it appears. Something else is going on, something quite other than oops. . . . This book is about all of that "something other than oops." It isabout a possible Deeper Order. It is about evolution, and about religion, and, in a sense, about everything in between. It is a brief history of cosmos, bios, psyche, theos—a tale told by an idiot, it goes without saying, but a tale that, precisely in signifying Nothing, signifies the All, and there is the sound and the fury. This is a book about holons—about wholes that are parts of other wholes,indefinitely. Whole atoms are parts of molecules; whole molecules are parts of cells; whole cells are parts of organisms, and so on. Each whole is simultaneously a part, a whole/part, a holon. And reality is composed, not of things nor processes nor wholes nor parts, but of whole/ parts, of holons. We will be looking at holons in the cosmos, in the bios, in the psyche, and in theos; and at theevolutionary thread that connects them all, unfolds them all, embraces them all, endlessly. The first chapters deal with holons in the physical cosmos (matter) and in the biosphere (life). This is the general area of the natural and ecological sciences, the life sciences, the systems sciences, and we will explore each of them carefully. This is particularly important, given not only the ecologicalcrisis now descending on this planet with a vengeance, but also the large number of movements, from deep ecology to ecofeminism, that have arisen in an attempt to find spirituality and ecology connected, not divorced; and we will look at the meaning of all of that. The middle chapters explore the emergence of the mind or the psyche or the noosphere, and at the holons that compose the psyche...