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Ken Wilber's Fourth Turning in Buddhism

Some new Wilber material which some might find of interest:

https://www.integrallife.com/integral-post/toward-fourth-turning-buddhism?page=0,0

RE: Ken Wilber's Fourth Turning in Buddhism
Answer
8/7/14 7:46 AM as a reply to Jason Snyder.
I'm about halfway through the article. It seems so far to be a pretty clear summary of a lot of Ken's thinking. His stuff is tricky. He can have a way of presenting things that makes it seem like everyone agrees with him and he is just summarizing a bunch of allready given information, rather than presenting his own system, and cherry picking a huge number of sources to support his system. I suspect the truth is somewhere in between those two extremes.

In my own experience, I voraciously read through his material in my late teens. It was great because it exposed me to a lot of different contemplative systems and Western thinkers. What i found when I went to those primary sources was that, in their own contexts, they were a lot more diverse than in Ken's presentation, and I could see the way that by cutting and pasting his own terminology into the quotes he was lifting from the original sources, he could create a greater sense of unity amongst these thinkers, researchers and contemplative traditions than would be seen there in a more direct reading of the primary sources.

That said, when I think of the hilariously profound fundamental flaws of text books all the way up through college level stuff, I have often thought that we'd be a lot better off if something like Ken's theories were made the basis for k-12 education, if for no other reason than that i observe most people who go really deeply into Integral thinking of one kind or another tend to come out the other side with a very well-rounded appreciation for various different disciplines and their inter-relationships once they outgrow the dogmatisms of the initial presentation.

RE: Ken Wilber's Fourth Turning in Buddhism
Answer
8/23/14 9:34 AM as a reply to Jason Snyder.
An attempt at a brutal summary:
The idea, it would seem, is to keep the number of new elements actually included in any new Turning to an absolute minimum. The three items above are at the top of my list for additions, but there are others which at least deserve consideration
1. Structures and States

So the first point about a possible Fourth (or Fifth) Turning is that, unknown to humans generally, everybody has up to a dozen types of intelligence that appear to have evolved over the centuries to deal with different fundamental issues and problems. These cannot be seen by introspecting or looking within; they are not something we look at, they are something we look through.

And thus any truly comprehensive meditative system would want to be aware of this double development—development occurring in states and development occurring in structures—and thus include both states of consciousness and structures of consciousness in their teachings—the states being how we WAKE UP, and the structures being how we GROW UP. Both, needless to say, are profoundly important.
2. Shadow Work

A few simple psychotherapeutic techniques—such as identifying repressed material, re-owning it, integrating it, then letting it go—would help to handle that nearly 80% of the problems that seem to arise during meditation. But until then, the only advice most meditation teachers have for their students is, "Intensify your efforts!," exactly what is not needed.
3. Meta-theory of Spiritual and Scientific

But whatever meta-theory one adopts, it is clear that any religion of the future will have to have, as part of its dharma, dogma, gospel, or teachings a formal statement on the relation of science and spirituality, and thus a meta-theory of one sort or another would be a likely item in any new Turning.