Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution is philosopher Ken Wilber's magnum opus. Wilber intended for it to be the first volume in a series called The Kosmos Trilogy, but the second and third volumes have not yet appeared. The German edition of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality was entitled—perhaps more appropriately—Eros, Kosmos, Logos: Eine Jahrtausend-Vision ("A Millenium-vision").

Published in 1995, SES (as it is sometimes called) is the work in which Wilber grapples with modern philosophical naturalism, attempting to show its insufficiency as a explanation of being, evolution, and the meaning of life. Wilber also finds the global ecological crisis to be a result of what he calls modernity's "flatland" approach to being. He also describes a view, which he calls vision-logic, which is qualified to replace modernism. Vision-logic, according to Wilber, is a non-dominating awareness of holistic hierarchy, in which the pathological dissociations of Nature from Self, interiority from exteriority, and creativity from compassion are transformed into healthy differentiations.

The Structure of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Introduction
Book One

1. The Web of Life

• Uses Arthur Lovejoy's account of the Great Chain of Being to show how the mechanistic, materialistic modern worldview triumphed over the West's longstanding, holistic, hierarchical view.
• Pathological, dominating hierarchies have given hierarchy a bad name. But hierarchy is ultimately inescapable. Thus, we should concentrate on discovering what hierarchies actually do exist and on stengthening them.

2. The Pattern That Connects

• Describes Arthur Koestler's account of holism and holarchy
• Describes Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory

3. Individual And Social

• Describes Erich Jantsch's account of co-evolution and self-organizing systems

4. A View From Within

• Describes two inescapable aspects of existence: the "Right-hand path" (interiority) and the "Left-hand path" (exteriority).

5. The Emergence Of Human Nature

• Uses Jean Gebser's account of the development of human consciousness to show how the West progressed from the magic to the mythic to the rational mentalities.

6. Magic, Mythic And Beyond

• Describes Jurgen Habermas' account of socio-cultural development .

7. The Farther Reaches Of Human Nature

• Uses Jean Piaget's theory of developmental psychology to describe the moral-cognitive development of the contemporary human being.

8. The Depths Of The Divine

• Using the accounts of four mystics (Emerson on nature mysticism, St. Teresa of Avila on diety mysticism, Meister Eckhart on formless mysticism, and Ramana Maharshi on nondual mysticism), describes the possibilities for further individual spiritual development.

Book Two

9. The Way Up Is The Way Down

• "Ascending" philosophies are those that embrace the One, or the Absolute. "Descending" philosophies are those that embrace the Many, or Plenitude. Both ascent (AKA Eros, or creativity) and descent (AKA Agape, or compassion) are indespensible for a healthy, whole view.
• Describes how Plato's metaphysics included both ascending and descending drives.
• Uses the nondual Neo-Platonist Plotinus' attack on Gnosticism to trace differences between healthy and pathological hierarchies.
• Describes Aurobindo Ghosh's account of the evolution of being and integral consciousness.

10. This-Wordly, Otherwordly

• Describes attempts to repair modernism's fractured and flattened worldview, especially Schelling's existential idealism.

11. Brave New World

• Describes the profound advantages as well as the spiritually crippling disadvantages of the modern, scientific mentality.

12. The Collapse Of The Kosmos

• Describes Charles Taylor's account of the effects of the Enlightenment paradigm.
• The dissociation of Spirit in the West in the "Ego camp" (Kant's and Fichte's Absolute Ego) and the "Eco camp" (Spinoza's deified Nature).

13. The Dominance Of The Descenders

• Describes how the West tried to embrace the Many through science, but failed to embrace the One through mysticism.
• The result was the dissociation of the descending drive, or agape, into Thanatos (Freud's death drive) and Phobos (existential fear).

14. The Unpacking Of God

• Describes aspects of particular historical nondual views that could possibly heal the noetic fissures in the West, especially spiritual practice as understood by Zen & Dzogchen Buddhism.
• Includes a meditation on Emptiness as the world-space in which all entities are ontologically healed.

Quotation

"Put differently, I sought a world philosophy. I sought an integral philosophy, one that would believably weave together the many pluralistic contexts of science, morals, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world's great wisdom traditions. Not on the level of details—that is finitely impossible; but on the level of orienting generalizations: a way to suggest that the world is one, undivided whole, and related to itself in every way: a holistic philosophy for a holistic Kosmos: a world philosophy, an integral philosophy." —Ken Wilber, "Introduction to Volume Six of the Collected Works"