Ken Wilber has been a popular voice within the study of consciousness, integrated and interdisciplinary studies, and the quest for consilience—the underlying unity of all knowledge—for the past few decades. The following will present a number of excerpts and quotations from Ken Wilber’s seminal work The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977) interwoven with commentary from the perspective of Jewish mysticism.

While there are innumerable parallels with the system of systems that Wilber synthesizes from eastern and western sources, Kabbalah and Chassidic philosophy both compare and contrast in a number of important ways. This is the first entry in what will hopefully form an entire series of articles whose primary task will be to offer a critical reading of key concepts and expressions, ideals and affinities within this work of Wilber. These readings will be informal and in the spirit of an ‘infinite conversation,’ to borrow an expression from the French literary giant, Maurice Blanchot.

With great breath, depth is bound to be unequal. Wilber is no exception. He has often been accused of being a lumper—one who throws so much into the mix that it becomes garbled in pursuit of bringing everything all together. If one has the chutzpah to attempt to read so many of the major world traditions of spirituality and knowledge and bring them into a single conversation, one is bound to have to generalize. But beyond generalizations, there is a clear sense that Wilber favors some traditions more than others and certainly has delved deeper into those systems of thought that are more  readily adaptable to his own.

Decoding the Jewish dimensions and translations of Wilber’s thought is not always easy. Explicit references to anything Jewish are few and far between, bordering on non-existent. For the most part, Wilber compresses Judaism into the “Judeo-Christian” canon which itself somewhat deceptive. This ‘canon’ is the ideological invention of those seeking to only underscore the commonality of values between Jews and Christians. As a label, it wipes away in a single stroke any celebration of difference. Additionally, almost all of the limited Jewish source material quoted by Wilber is entirely reliant on questionable secondary sources.

Perhaps this lack of interest or knowledge of Judaism from Jewish sources is on account of incompatibility with his system of systems? Even the Kabbalah, which would seem on some level to be a shoe in for Wilber’s tastes, is rarely evoked and at that in a totally erroneously way. For those who are intimately acquainted with Jewish mysticism, the values inherent to it are highly resistant to summation nor can they be transposed into foreign systems of thought or translated without significant immersion in both the primary texts as well as the unbroken oral transmissions.

All of this leads us to an even larger ideological issue: Wilber unequivocally assumes in comparing everything with everything else that the fundamental differences are only external. Peek beneath the veil and all distinctions collapse—all traditions are relative and interchangeable. Moving cautiously through any of his works, a reader may want to keep in mind the need to compare and contrast. From a Jewish perspective the differences are as important as the similarities. There is always something ‘other’ which escapes the system—particularly a system that holds pretenses of representing the totality of anything.

On a secondary cautionary note, let us be reminded of the fundamental incompleteness of any grand unified theory (such as Wilber’s theory of consciousness). Science proceeds, according to Thomas Kuhn, as a series of revolutions—so too with other spheres of knowledge. Just when we think that everything has been nailed down and there is nothing left to be discovered, a loophole appears that breaks open our understanding and leads those of us willing to travel through that loophole towards ever more profound and expansive theories and realities.

In the words of Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the Chassidic movement: “I am able to contradict everything.” His intention was not to sound egotistical but rather to make an essential observation about knowledge and our ability to express it. While his immediate context within which this statement was made referred to the words and opinions of the great Rabbis, the principle of it applies to all areas of knowledge.

What the Baal Shem Tov (as he is called) was really driving at was epistemic humility. Everyone needs to nurture it. No matter how complete our knowledge may appear to be, there is always some loop hole, some zero-point or fracture, a weakness or anomaly that opens a tiny tear within the fabric of any argument or line of reasoning that will be uncovered by others. Moreover, this is not intended to be destructive but rather to push the envelope of our knowledge further.

Keeping all of this in mind within the present context of Wilber’s work means that it is far preferable to read his system as necessarily incomplete. However, rather than detracting from his scholarship, the qualification of incompleteness actually enhances it and provides for our ‘collaborative’ rereading Wilber with a Jewish intensity.

Let’s start with a few highlights from John White’s forward to the second edition (1993).

“Corresponding to what has been called the perennial philosophy, Wilber observes, is a perennial psychology—a view of human identity which see it as ultimately identical with the All or Cosmic Wholeness.” (p.xi)

First of all let us touch upon the idea of perennial philosophy—where do we see it in the Torah? Perennial philosophy in a nutshell is the position that there are some universal truths out there and that all religious traditions are simply just different interpretations of them. We could easily extend this definition to include all knowledge traditions. For example, one might frame science as but another slice of this universal truth. As such, some form of perennial philosophy is operating behind the scenes of most, if not all, forms of religious pluralism.

From the written text of the Torah, between all of the lines about a jealous God to the smashing of idols, one might get the impression that any notion of other world spiritual traditions or philosophies having a modicum of truth to them would be off the table. However, consider the following excerpt from an article on our site by Nir Menussi entitled A Flood of Knowledge:

Recovering the Meta-Torah

There’s a wisdom higher than Torah? The Torah needs science in order to be complete? All this sounds, well, sacrilegious, not to mention self-contradictory, coming from the Torah itself.

But it’s really a very basic concept in Judaism. The midrash—the Jewish homiletic tradition—says of the Torah that it is really a ‘leaf’ shed by a superior “high wisdom”. It’s not a whole, it’s a part. How can this not be sacrilegious? Because this high wisdom is also called Torah, using now a wider sense of the term. We can refer to this superior Torah as the Meta-Torah of which the revealed Torah is but the tip of the iceberg. This Meta-Torah is alluded to often in the midrash. The oft-quoted sayings that “Torah preceded the world”, that Torah served as the “blueprint of creation”, and that some day there will be revealed a “new Torah” or “the Torah of the Messiah”, all refer to the meta-Torah.

The idea of Torah and science being the higher and lower waters contributes a crucial element to this. It implies that the missing element needed in order to complete the Torah and reveal the Meta-Torah is none other than science—the sum truths of humanity’s exploratory endeavor. These truths are in fact lost Torah chapters, missing letters of the Divine word that ‘fell’ off and were scattered in the physical universe. By discovering and elevating them, we ourselves become active participators in the revelation of the Divine word.

In other words, the Torah that we have is part of an even larger meta-Torah (which is also Torah). In the future these hidden dimensions will be revealed from within the familiar Torah that we have, only they will involve the “conversion” of the wisdom of the nations—a subject that will receive book-length treatment in the forthcoming publication from the Gal Einai Institute tentatively titled Converting the Wisdom of the Nations.

The basic kabbalistic idea is that a multitude of spiritual ‘sparks’ fell and were distributed throughout the world and that the ingathering ofthe exiles is in part a process of collecting together all of these foreign ‘sparks’—i.e. that which is not immediately associated with Torah—and “converting” them back into a Torah context. A practical example would be the appropriating of a Greek word like Sanhedrin into Hebrew and using it to refer to the highest body of Rabbinical judges.

In short, rather than seeing all insight monopolized within the formal and narrow definition of Torah, there exists a more plastic sense of Torah comprising all wisdom—even that which stems from a seemly foreign context. This could be viewed as a form of reverse assimilation—the opposite of diluting Jewish identity within the cultural and social norms of other societies. Instead everything found in the world may go through a clarification process that can filter through all wisdom and extract the spark of truth that gives vitality to any system of knowledge.

It cannot be stressed enough how challenging this process is nor the spiritual pitfalls that lie therein. It is a high-risk, high-return venture. The Jewish position still assumes centrality in this model so there would not be an acceptance of a center-less vision that puts all perspectives on equal footing as in Wilber’s conception of a ‘spectrum’ with all its relative frequencies.

Sometimes Wilber gives the impression of levying an all or nothing ultimatum. Either total fusion or unfortunate fractions. This point represents a critical departure from the comparativist-pluralist camp of Wilber, in that for Judaism sometimes one has to first separate in order to unify. We might even add that the premature dissolution of differences may result in the miscarriage of the end goal of peace and unity—a point that undoubtedly demands elaboration beyond the confines of the present article. So for now, we shall leave it as a stubbornly persistent question.

Regarding the quest for a ‘perennial psychology’—there is a definite notion of universal structures of the soul or psyche. At the same time some models are better than others. More importantly, not all people light up experientially in the same way. The inner psychological dynamics can vary as can the source of those experiences. Personalization requires there to be some differences. Perhaps this is the greatest weakness in Wilber’s thinking—the Divine or some Wilberian synonym thereof, is impersonal.

As for “human identity being identical with the All or Cosmic Wholeness,” Jewish mystics definitely see this on “some level” but with lots of qualifications. In the classic texts of Kabbalah and Chassidic philosophy, there are lengthy expositions as to the degree with which human identity may contain Cosmic Wholeness. What must be emphasized however, is that this ‘containment’ find its ethical expression in the sense of infinite responsibility for the other and not mere self-enlightenment.

In conclusion: the traditional Jewish drive for wholeness and unified truth is forecast in the words of the ancient Hebrew prophets. One straightforward example would be from the book of Zephaniah (3:9) which paints the following picture: “For then I will change the nations [to speak] a pure language, so that they all will proclaim the Name of God, to worship with a united resolve.” This is to say, we will reach a time of global unity and develop a universal language that acknowledges a single ultimate reality. Could it be to this end that Wilber’s work attracts our attention?

Print PDF