Ken Wilber is an American writer and philosopher, born in 1949, best known for integral theory, a grand map that tries to fit the world’s psychologies, philosophies and spiritual traditions into a single scheme of developmental stages. His pre/trans fallacy is the mistake of confusing what comes before a mature, personal self with what goes beyond it, because both lie outside ordinary adult thinking. Therapeutic Shamanism uses an adapted, non-hierarchical version of his three stages, and rejects the ladder of spirituality that places shamanism and animism near the bottom.
Who is Ken Wilber? #
A writer on psychology and spirituality. He was born in Oklahoma City in January 1949, studied at Duke University and did graduate work in biology and chemistry at the University of Nebraska, but turned instead to psychology, philosophy and mysticism.1 His first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977), was followed by No Boundary (1979), The Atman Project (1980), Up from Eden (1981), Eye to Eye (1983), Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995) and A Brief History of Everything (1996), among many others. Grace and Grit (1991) is different in kind: the story of his wife Treya Killam Wilber’s illness and death from breast cancer, told partly through her own journals.2
He began within transpersonal psychology, the branch of psychology concerned with experience beyond the individual self, and later developed what he calls integral theory. Its best-known form, AQAL (“all quadrants, all levels”), sets out to map every field of knowledge at once, through quadrants, levels of development, lines, states and types.3
What is the pre/trans fallacy? #
Wilber’s name for a confusion between two stages that look alike from outside. He set it out in an essay first published in 1980, The Pre/Trans Fallacy. In any line of growth, development runs from pre-X to X to trans-X, and because pre-X and trans-X are both “non-X”, they “may appear similar, even identical, to the untutored eye”.4 Applied to the self, the pre-personal, the magical thinking of early childhood, can be mistaken for the transpersonal, which lies beyond a mature self.
The fallacy runs both ways. Some people raise childish, magical thinking to the status of spiritual insight; others reduce every genuine spiritual experience to a return to infancy. The essay is often described as a turning point in his work.5 How Therapeutic Shamanism uses the three stages, as the child, the true Adult and the ElderElder (True Elder). The rarer stage beyond Adulthood. Adults decide; Elders advise. More about this or shaman, and the fallacy as a test of whether something is mature spirituality or wishful thinking, is set out in What are the pre-personal, personal and transpersonal, and what is the pre-trans fallacy?
Where does shamanism sit in Wilber’s scheme? #
Low on the ladder. Wilber’s model of spiritual development, in its early form, rose through four stages, from the psychic, through the subtle and the causal, to the nondual.6 In Up from Eden he applied a similar sequence to the whole of human history, with each higher level discovered later than the one before; on this reading, shamans were the first to reach the subtle level systematically, and the later contemplative traditions went on to higher ones.7 Tribal and magical ways of seeing sit near the base of the whole structure.
That is the point at which Therapeutic Shamanism and Wilber are furthest apart.
Why does Therapeutic Shamanism reject his ladder? #
Because shamanism is an entirely non-hierarchical spirituality. It is free of the idea that up is good and down is bad: the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer is not a better place than the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer, God is not superior to Goddess, humans are not superior to animals, and animals are not superior to plants and stones.8 The idea that “up is good and down is bad”, that spirituality lies in ascending and transcending the world, is one of the foundation stones of Taker culture, and it is at the heart of the sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this.9 A map that ranks spiritualities from lower to higher carries that same story into psychology.
It shapes how the inner world is seen too. There is no single self but an inner tribeInner Tribe. The community of parts-of-self that a human being actually is. Health is not one part’s triumph but a well-run tribe: every member honoured, every member doing its proper job, the Adult in charge. Read the full answer, and getting to know its members means not bringing in the hierarchical thinking that calls the Upper-World part of us “highest” and the rest lower.10 So Therapeutic Shamanism takes one model of Wilber’s, the three stages, and leaves the ladder behind. See What is the inner tribe? and How has spirituality been used to justify domination?
Who else has challenged his hierarchy, and how has he answered? #
The best-known challenge from within transpersonal psychology comes from the psychologist Jorge Ferrer. In Revisioning Transpersonal Theory (2002) he put forward a ‘participatory’ view in which the world’s spiritual paths are many valid ways of taking part in the mystery, not rungs on one ladder, and he has said that even Wilber’s later model still ranks nondual and formless spiritualities above theistic and visionary ones, shamanic ones among them.11
In 2002 Wilber dismissed the book as expressing “a green-meme approach to spirituality”, meaning a stage of development below his own integral one, and charged it with contradicting itself, by criticising hierarchical ranking whilst ranking views of its own.12 Ferrer replied in 2011 that he accepts Wilber’s analysis of anti-hierarchical stances but that it does not apply to his own view, because the participatory approach does make qualitative distinctions between spiritual paths, resting them on practical values such as selflessness, embodiment and integration, not on a single ladder.13 He also holds that his hierarchy is more inclusive than older ones, because it treats the earlier stages as necessary parts of growth, not as mistakes.14
