while on the way to a diagram and explanation, which i still mean to offer, i happened on an analogy which might simply convey the distinction i’m considering. it goes like this:

the Great Mass of People subsist on The American Diet. the diet amounts to a set of definitions of what food is and what health is. the diet produces a host of illnesses which are accepted as normal and addressed medically. some people have what we might call extreme allergic reactions to this diet which prove chronic and medically unmanageable. for these people, the only way to health is a new diet, amounting to a redefinition of food and health.

it is this redefinition of ‘food’ and ‘health’ (or in Phildickian terms, ‘real’ and ‘human’) that i’m calling ‘radical difference’ between ‘normal’ and ’shamanic’ empathy. the fundamental terms (hence ‘radical) have been redefined. the chronically ill person isn’t seeking a return to the normal diet with its definition of food and health. in terms of our discussion: the normal person dining on the Great American Diet isn’t seeking universal empathy, even if they define their diet as such.

that definition of the norm as the universal is a myth (is, in fact, what Campbell referred to as the Great Bronze Age Myth of social norms as forms orienting toward the transcendent Absolute). the clearest example of this conflation of the normal for the absolute, to my mind, is Jefferson’s statement in the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. An absolute value, though in actual fact, in Jefferson’s world, not all men were men.

this radical change in diet (that is, in the fundamental ideas of ‘food’ and ‘health’, or ‘real’ and ‘human’) can be seen in the phenomenon of religious revivals (and also political revolutions). the revivalist (or shaman) seeks to make conventional values real. even though the revivalist and the conventional congregationalist point toward the same ideals (the Gospel stories, for example), the revivalist attempts to embody those values in an immediate way that the conventional congregationalist does not.

to return to the diet metaphor, both the society of the Great American Diet and the Health Food Nut agree on the importance of proper nutrition and health, their definitions of these are radically different. So that is sum is what i’ve been trying to point out: the depth of empathy you’re aiming at is not the norm, even if both are described as ‘empathy.’

i have some faith that i’ll continue to improve at articulating this distinction, so if it still hasn’t come across, it might at some point in the future.

last week i flew cross country on a plane and wrote a long post with a similar title. i still plan to return to that post – to post that post. this is something of an introduction and tangent. an introductory tangent.

first, i’d like to remove politics from this blog and over to Hamlet’s Nation, and that way to separate out that particular species from the genera of discussion here, leaving Androids in Love as a place to discuss love, narcissism and the phenomenon of coming alive. a phenomenon intimately connected with the so-called God’s Eye View, henceforth GEV.

ToCome Alive (CA) is to participate in the GEV. In traditional terms – and by Tradition i am referring to the tradition of thought and feeling inherent to civilization – to participate in the GEV is to be ensouled; and it is possession of a divine soul – a soul which participates in the GEV – that characterizes a human being.

This message picks up from the prior comment thread:

It seems to me we’re not that far off, so I’ll spell out what I think we agree on and where I think we differ.

Little Phil Dick (LPD) was abused by his mom both physically and psychologically and this left him with a feeling he had no essential value except insofar as he could realize the ability his mother admired, but failed at herself. In LPD’s case, this meant becoming a writer. The career and personal life LPD built reflected this unstable foundation. Though he was prodigiously productive, his productivity was increasingly fueled by drugs, inconsistent in quality and barely successful enough to support him. His relationships followed a similar course. Though he had grown into PKD, inside he was still LPD, unconsciously seeking to satisfy a a fundamentally dysfunctional emotional script which held out the possibility of basic self-acceptance as a reward for accomplishment. Eventually this script grew so exaggerated (to Biblical proportions) that in order to satisfy it, PKD drove himself to a psychotic episode and in the ultimate vain attempt at self-worth, came to fashion himself as a prophet, though he agonized over this compensatory identification for the rest of his life.

Do we agree to that point?

I’m going to suppose that we do and move on to the matter in disagreement, which I’d describe as the nature of PKD’s agony. What stands out for me as distinct from what we might call ‘mere oscillation’ between hyper-inflation and complete deflation is the degree of objectivity and humor that PKD brought to consideration of the two states.

When I write that you seem to me fixated on the ‘analytic phase’ (and by ‘fixated’ i mean mistaking that aspect for the whole) I mean that you notice the fact of the analytic agony but not the degree to which PKD was actually able to reconcile the either/or split. I take this impression from your use of two quotes from VALIS, as if those prove PKD was stuck in either/or thinking, when the book as a whole testifies to how adept and flexible he became – through his obvious struggles – at bringing those opposites into relationship.

I don’t think Phil fully resolved the split, or in the language of taoist alchemy, transformed false yin and false yang (which are antithetical) into true yin and true yang (which are complementary). But as i see it, Phil’s art testifies to an at least intellectual motion along that path. As Bi11 commented:

This isn’t just both sides of AN issue, but both sides of something existentially central.

Finally, in searching for an image of PKD for this post I came across this interview with Tessa that you might find interesting. Here’s a bit on Phil’s 3-2-7 experience from Tessa’s perspective:

Q: As a skeptic I have a really hard time believing that 2-3-74 was ‘real’, but I know it was real to Philip – and what’s more I do ‘feel’ a lot of truth in the experience. What can you tell me about those experiences that might help me wrap my brain around all of this?

A: The experience of 3/2/74 (it was March 2, not Feb. 3; the confusion arose from the difference between European and American date notations). was very real. The question is, what was it? Was Phil suffering minor strokes? Hallucinating due to drugs or mental illness? Or seeing reality?

I submit that the evidence points toward something very real. There was the night when our radio would not stop playing, even when it was unplugged. There was the Xerox letter, which I held in my hands and read. There were strange cars stopping in the alley behind our apartment at all hours of the day and night. There was the yellow van that parked out front. Two men in workmen’s coveralls got out of the van and carried about a dozen cardboard boxes into the vacant apartment next door.

One strong possibility is that the electronic equipment in the vacant apartment next door was affecting both our radio and Phil’s mind. I know that I also had some very strange dreams during that time.

Phil wrote that he had wisdom teeth extracted, which is ridiculous. He no longer had any wisdom teeth. He had two broken molars. He also mangled his description of our son’s hernia when he wrote about it, but he got it right when he jumped up from one of his frequent naps and told me about it. Something very strange was going on, and although the general anaesthesia for the oral surgery might have had some effect on Phil’s mind, there was much more to it.

“The fountain of content must spring up in the mind, and he who hath so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless efforts and multiply the grief he proposes to remove.”

– Samuel Johnson

an excerpt from an email i just wrote, posted here to preserve the thought so that i might remind me:

i was on campus last night attending an interesting panel discussion of the recent citizens united supreme court case… a fact i mention because i had that very experience of pleasure at having my mind sufficiently occupied without much self-management on my part. i only had to put myself into the proper place.

hmmm. i presume you’re familiar with what we might call the existential ideal, according to which the ’spring of contentment’ emerges within. in the absence of such perfect self-sufficiency, fortunate are those who find help from without… whose food is medicine.

takes a significant amount of self-management just to get to that point.

i’m having a hard time shaking the desire to respond to Ben’s idea (such as i construe it) that i ought (if i were, you know, to actually do something) to create some sort of public blog to facillitate a grassroots effort to map effective models for productive activism. as i’ve sarcastically expressed before, the fundamental flaw in this program is that it’s not mine. i’m not the one frustrated with liberals getting upset about the way our society operates but not being able to do shit about it. yeah, it sucks… but

a. that’s not my particular frustration, and
b. it seems to me that there are plenty of liberal blogs out there wrestling day in and out with the issue of effective action, and
c. i have no sense of how to moderate such a community, or even establish it in some way that it doesn’t become another political blog of the well-established form.

my frustration – which is something other than Ben’s frustration with me and other liberals who feel outrage but can’t effectively act on it – is with the general level of understanding, the worldview, within which politics is commonly framed. i want to find a middle way between raving conspiracy theory and the semi-conscious credulousness of the political mainstream online.

now, you can regard that as a sort of Ender’s Game fantasy of accomplishment. i think that’s an ill-informed read. while my particular writing may never be of consequence beyond the few people who come here, there are plenty of bloggers who influence our society simply by blogging. mass blogs are not the only way. and anyway, popular success does not conclusively measure the worth of activity.

which gets to the problem of being diagnosed by someone who has a portion of truth that they can’t separate from their own presumptions and hang-ups. point being: my problem is not that i’m not endeavoring to set up a mass blog (or donating money to someone else’s mass blog) but that i’m not diligent in the work that i’m already doing. yes, the format of Androids in Love isn’t focused enough. it’s a sandbox. the developed version of it simply isn’t a mass blog… necessarily.

truth is, i haven’t entirely ruled it out. i just don’t see how it relates to doing the work i feel needs doing. not the work that ‘the world’ needs, but the work i feel as if i’m slacking from. i’ve no idea how any of it translates into historical action. i’m not out to write propaganda but to formulate a worldview.

one of the principal interests driving me in the discussion of Wilber was the prospect of distinguishing Wilber’s thinking from Wilber’s interpersonal style. had the discussion survived this process, i was aiming on bringing in the so-called Cube of Cognitive quality, which i’ve been tinkering with in the background. it’s an idea – the Cube – that came to me in a dream, and has since recurred. It is personally numinous, and of course (by its mere geometric aspect) to some extent archetypal.

the three axes bear many labels, though in terms of cognitive quality i describe them as Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Goodness is perhaps the easiest for me to describe right now, as my sense of it has just clarified in editing my parting response to Ben. Goodness is humanity, or humane-ity. A person’s goodness -as a person- is a measure of how well they serve the common good of humanity. the summum bonum. The poles of the Good axis might be labeled Selfless and Selfish.

we might recall here Lao Tzu’s description of the Tao being a merging of those two poles, whereby the Selfless rejuvenates the selfish while being revived by it. this is easy to appreciate – because we don’t morally judge biological systems – in terms of the Selfish gene, that by its perfect ruthlessness of self-replication enables the collective systems of biology to function and evolve. thus the axis of Goodness does not run from good to absence of good, in an ultimate sense. rather True Goodness (as opposed to the idealistic moral fantasies of spurious conscience) is the axis itself, and the two faces of that goodness are its poles.

which gets to a blindness typical of reformed people who feel great shame over their former selves. wanting to redeem themselves, they become advocates of Good over Evil, which is a partial truth that can never recapture the understanding of Tao – the Tao awareness that is the source of moral systems. This Tao Awareness forms the ‘vertical’, or Truth, axis of the Cube, and runs between ‘formal’ and ‘essential’. This axis is the one spoken of by Wilber and the Spiral Dynamics folks. Formal truth is reality articulated in Law. Essential truth is the Presence that understands law as an awareness, a Presence. The higher up the ladder of Presence, the more unified and abstract is the Truth. At the bottom the ladder Truth is bifurcated into a subject/object relationship.

Like the axis of Goodness, Truth is not at one end of the axis or the other. Truth is the Axis, even though one side is in a sense greater and the other less. Just as Collective systems need Selfish Genes, to Essential Truth needs formalized expressions… and vice-versa. The Way integrates and harmonizes the opposites, thereby healing division rather than resolving it by eliminating one side. Trans, versus Pre solutions. Solution by evolution rather than regression to a fundamentalist fantasy.

The third Axis is Beauty and this is the one i understand least. If we consider it in terms of, say, Wilber, i’d identify it with the charasmatic style of his writing. Feel free to fill in the blanks here…

While I jump ahead to get back to the beginning, to the Cube, and say these three axes form a phase space of what i’ve been calling ‘cognitive quality’. After we distinguish these different qualities – so as to escape the blindness whereby a moral judgment is construed as an intellectual one – we might put them back together. Without distinguishing these axes, we tend to judge people along a line, whereby the evil are the untrue, or the unattractive, or both. The Cube presents a differentiated space, in which we might witness patterns of motion (attractors), representing the complex interactions of Beauty, Goodness and Truth. Or False Conscience (Beauty lies for Beauty’s own sake), Spurious Consience and True Conscience. Or inversely: Truth, Justice and the American Way.

As that comment thread has gotten a bit thick, i’m going to break up back to the main line to answer a few of open questions.

Ben writes:

r.u. agreeing with my earlier characterization of wilber as a ‘poet of the transcendant’, or r u making an argument that a worldview which does not emphasize logic can rely on specious arguments yet still somehow be ‘true’ in some objective sense?

there are a number of important issues compressed here. i’ll take them in the order they appear:

1. i wouldn’t label Wilber a poet of the transcendent. i’d used that label for Rumi, and Wilber is not of the same species as Rumi. i’d label Wilber in the manner he labels himself, as a pandit. the pandit systematizes what the poet intuits. Wilber’s aim is to reconcile the understandings of physical science, psychology (and religion), political theory and and social criticism. The point of his theory, summarized in the AQAL model is to provide a framework in which each of the profound modes of human understanding is given a place to exist, so that its form of truth is recognized and allowed for. This is well, and succinctly, explained in the wikipedia article on Wilber.

it seems to me that you either have never understood his point (the aim and its expression in AQAL), or else don’t believe that any such thing can be done. or, you believe such a thing can be done, but Wilber hasn’t done it. my sense is that it’s probably some combination of all three attitudes.

this gets to the second question you ask above. the form of that question suggests to me that you haven’t quite consciously grasped this fundamental point of Wilber’s work. Wilber’s proposition is that in order to evolve beyond the dissociation of religion from science from social justice and understanding we need to accord each of these spheres – the Quadrants of the AQAL model – their own validity by recognizing the manner in which validity is obtained within these domains.

the point i was making was that if Wilber misunderstands evolution (and i’m happy to suppose he does) i’d attribute that to his worldview, which is dominated by this project of reconciling disparate domains, rather than to some form of stupidity. i suspect all worldviews have blindspots, and it seems to me that construing these blindspots as stupidity is exactly the sort of failure in empathy that you object to in Wilber in his behavior relative to the ‘mean green meme.’ the difference, as i see it, is principally that Wilber has a name for his deprecated worldview. he’s gone through the trouble of analyzing and representing the mindset.

i’m not saying that mindset makes the untrue true, but that i think equating instances of ‘mindset blindness’ (misunderstandings introduced by the imperfect nature of the representational mindsets we use to conceive of ourselves and our world) with stupidity (e.g. extraordinarily poor logical ability) suggests a failure of empathy, and, i think, understanding. To posit mindset blindness before jumping to stupidity is in my view both more reasonable and more just.

even if i’m correct in this, i have no intention of expressing that you are doing anything ‘inappropriate’ or shameful. as i see it, it’s one instance of mindset blindness commenting on another. who knows? maybe this is just my mindset blindness… and you’re free to explain as such if it seems so to you.

sorry for the delay. i’ve been consumed by work and real life details… on the plus side, it’s given me time to get clearer on what seems to me the substance of our debate. but first, the long-outstanding question about Sylar:

i’d not responded to this question because i have no particular idea of what to do with Sylar. i still don’t, in part because what happens with Sylar is dependent on what happens with the other characters and story as a whole, and in part because i’m not engaged with either the characters or the story to that level.

i have, though, had a new level of appreciation for the dilemma of Sylar’s incarnation, you might say, in the form of Nathen Petrelli. it’s similar to the ghola situation in DUNE, in which the conscious personality regards the submerged root personality with profound ambivalence. it is on the one hand magnetically attractive and on the other entirely terrifying, as recovery of the root personality involves a sort of death of the conscious personality. In actuality, with gholas who recover their root identity, the conscious personality and the root personality are merged (or in Wilber’s terms, the conscious personality is transcended and included). The death the conscious personality fears is as partial as is the conscious personality itself. What perishes is what you might call the conscious personality’s illusion of absolute existence.

in Sylar/Petrelli there’s an additional tension, as the submerged root personality is guilty of so many murders. for Petrelli to recall his life as Sylar is to open himself to a tremendous guilt… though this tension is lessened somewhat by the, you might say, absurdly ambivalent character of Nathen Petrelli. whereas Sylar killed personally, Nathen was willing (in season one) to go along with mass murder (the destruction of NYC), and then (last season) was instrumental in the systematic abduction and apparently permanent incarceration of everyone with powers. his appetite for power and willingness to violate others in order to achieve it is hardly less than Sylar’s. he’s just of a different class, and so rather than the outcast loner he operates within and by means of institutions of power.

this difference in class adds a third tension between the conscious and the root personalities.

mashing Sylar and Petrelli reminds me suddenly of The Corporation, which diagnoses the behavior of corporations in terms of individual psychopathology.

we can, i think, draw a parallel between the fear/desire of the conscious personality relative to the root personality and the resistance of individuals to information as to the partiality of their worldview. i don’t have this language worked out well, but in short, worldview and the conscious personality are intimately connected. consider the class consciousness at issue in this video on Obama’s reaction to the Gates affair:

aside from general interest, i’m going on about this even though it doesn’t answer your question about what i’d do with the character (still have no inclination there) because it relates directly to the framework in which i’m going to answer your questions concerning what i see happening in your critique of Wilber. in short, i suspect that part of your criticism of Wilber is worldview based. that, in other words, you express an animosity that is typical of worldview conflict.

in particular i’m referring to your assertion that “wilber’s ability to process information logically is exceptionally poor”, based on his disagreement with neo-darwinian orthodoxy. as i see it, you’re interpreting a difference in worldview as a failure in cognitive capacity – a conflation that i take as a red flag of worldview conflict.

Wilber’s unorthodox view of evolution is, in my opinion, better described as an artifact of his worldview, which is not defined by the dictates of material science. It’s not because he can’t process information logically, but because he’s aiming to integrate disparate domains and so take into account different information than the strict neo-darwinian… who may be compartmentalized so as to beleive logically in evolution but emotionally in some moral divinity.

Again, the red-flag (as i see it) of worldview conflict is the interpretation of differences rooted in worldview as deficiencies in the capacities and/or character of the other. In short, it seems to me you’re doing in essence the same thing that Wilber (so i’ve heard) does in dismissing people on grounds of their Green perspectives. Except that Wilber’s conscious of it. He spells it out, whereas in the instance i’m speaking of the conflation occurs unconsciously as a conviction that anyone exposed to information X must, if they are intellectually competent, reach conclusion Y.

Again, the difference as i see it is not a result of intellectual incompetence, but of a will to integrate additional information – the information, in Wilber’s terms, of the monological, dialogical and translogical eyes (rather than the monological alone). He may very well fail in the attempt, and the attempt may be futile in general, but we might at least understand the nature of his perspective.

so, that said, to your other questions:

1. no
2. no
3. you can make the argument, though i thought we’d already agreed that his philosophy doesn’t in itself preclude empathy. though it is common for people to only empathize with others who share their worldview (or whom they assume to share their worldview) – members of their class, in other words – i believe true empathy transcends these distinctions. therefore, to articulate a philosophy that reckons distinctions does not preclude true empathy. as i see it, the failure to reckon class distinctions doesn’t liberate true empathy, but only makes the conditions in which empathy is withheld unconscious.
4. no.
5. my discussion of the issue of ‘clarity’ relates to what i took to be the general case you were building as to Wilber’s intellectual incapacity.
6. it seems to me you’re interpreting ‘clearly’ as ‘infallibly’. when i say he writes clearly i mean he constructs sentences well and spells out his ideas… clearly enough that they can be converted into diagrams. his associations may not hold water, may not be infallibly established, but i think he spells them out well, in clear sentences, with diagrams.

as i’ve written, i’ve read exactly one book by Wilber, and that a short one (The Marriage of Sense and Soul), and only the bits of criticism linked from this site. i’m not in any position to have an opinion about who expresses Wilber’s ideas best.

though, if his critics are capable of expressing the same ideas more clearly, the ideas must have been put forth clearly enough in the first place for them to get the idea, right? you’ve said you’ve a friend who reads Wilber to keep informed of other thinkers (another testimonial to his clarity, apparently). why not ask him or her why he or she reads him?

i’m curious, finally, about the claim that you’ve done over a dozen footnote searches that have led off into apparently infinite regresses. you’ll gather that i’m suspicious of it, first of all on purely practical grounds. Dr. Manhattan strikes again! there are a dozen versions of you still on those quests, right? but seriously, it’s impossible for me to understand what you mean to say. one footnote led to another footnote which led to another footnote which led… where? how about a few examples so i can get a sense of what … means?

Solar Hero wrote:

Well, the whole thing about the significance of the AQAL metatheory is: who has applied it for a greater good?

Even Jesus said you measure things by their fruits.

To which this reply, moved up from the comments:

there’s a difference between theory and practice based on theory. A theory of developmental levels, like AQAL, is separate from particular practices intended to encourage or enable development along those levels. the theory merely says they exist; the practice verifies their existence.

this, i reckon though i have only skimmed the subject a bit, is why Wilber writes of the necessity of a ‘community of the adequate’ – to verify the levels described theoretically through applied practices.

so, returning to what you wrote: i’m having difficulty understanding how it is that the theory itself might have fruits, given that merely holding a theory as true is not sufficient to accomplish anything. except according to, for example, those Christians who believe in the ultimate efficacy of belief (otherwise known as wishful thinking). (now there’s a tree that we might judge by its bitter fruit.) from the little i know, i wouldn’t take Wilberites to hold such a view (i.e. a belief in the salvic power of merely believing in AQAL). therefore, the fruits of believing in AQAL are dependent upon practices.

my question, then, is how to separate the fruits of the theory from the fruits of the practices? if, for example, you are spurred by AQAL to take up daily meditative and martial practices (by the revelation that there are levels of perception), and if you actually follow through on those practices, then you might very well accomplish something for your own good (and hence the greater good of those in your sphere). but this is hardly a fruit of the specific theory, as the practice brought the results and the practice might have been motivated by some other theory with that same general developmental notion.

so i guess that’s where i’m not following your specific assertion: i don’t understand what sort of consequence AQAL itself might have. is it radical enough, or aberrant enough, to have any? my ignorance prevents me from answering. i’ve no idea.

thanks for the comment, though! i feel quite a bit closer now to having a framework for considering AQAL.

are you following this, Ben?

let me recap: i’m neither offended by nor enamored of Wilber’s originality or lack thereof; i regard reports of Wilber’s personal flaws as plausible, but not particularly interesting as i’m not interested in deifying him anyway; but if there were some radical aspect of his theory that were in itself consequential… that’d be interesting. some worldview feature like: God hates homosexuality therefore i’m going to try to pray away the gay. a radical belief that strongly suggests a particular course of abberant action.

are you aware of anything like that?