Content
Published in 1995, SES (as it is sometimes abbreviated) is the work in which Wilber grapples with modern philosophical naturalism, attempting to show its insufficiency as an explanation of being, evolution, and the meaning of life. He also describes an approach, called vision-logic, which he finds qualified to succeed modernism.
Wilber's project in this book requires nothing less than a complete re-visioning of the history of Eastern and Western thought. There are four philosophers that Wilber finds to be of the highest importance:
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- Plotinus, Neo-Platonic philosopher, who introduced the first nondual philosophy to the West
- Nagarjuna, Buddhist philosopher, who did the same in the East
- Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, German Idealist who created the first evolutionary nondual philosophy in the West and
- Sri Aurobindo, Hindu yogi and philosopher who did the same in the East
This is, of course, radically different from the usual history of philosophy, in which Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant and sometimes Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche are typically seen as important Western philosophers.
Wilber argues that the account of existence presented by the Enlightenment is incomplete—it ignores and represses the spiritual and noetic components of existence. He accordingly avoids the term cosmos, which is associated with merely physical existence. He prefers the term kosmos to refer to the sum of manifest existence, which harks back to the usage of the term by the Pythagoreans and other ancient mystics. Wilber conceives of the Kosmos as consisting of several concentric spheres: matter (the physical universe) plus life (the vital realm) plus mind (the mental realm) plus soul (the psychic realm) plus Spirit (the spiritual realm).
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