Wilber's first warrant for his four stages of
the spiritual path tries to disguise training in a hierarchical
spiritual school as peer spiritual inquiry. It presents what is in fact
teacher-run experiential training as if it were peer group experiential
inquiry, and teacher assessment of skills as peer validation of data.
The teacher in experiential training tells you what experiences
you are able to have, tells you how to have them and checks whether you
have had them. The peers in an experiential inquiry ask whether
a defined experience is what it claims to be, enter the experience in
ways that are open to falsifying the definition, then check with each
other to see whether their experiential data does or does not support
the definition.
What Wilber
calls consensual validation by checking with others is really
teacher-dominated assessment of training outcomes. And this is not at
all the same as confirmation or refutation in a peer community of
inquiry. It is important to note that the peers, in such an inquiry, do
not validate experiential data. That is, they do not confirm or refute
their experiences in the light of the original idea - that is peer
assessment of learning. They do the opposite: they confirm or refute
the original idea in the light of their experiences - and that is peer
inquiry.
Wilber refers to Zen as an example of trascendental inquiry. Zen, however, is a training
run by a Zen teacher who has himself had ten to twenty years of
training within a very strong, long-standing and traditional lineage.
This powerful tradition has both cognitive and technical authority: it
defines both what experiences mean and how to have them. Zen is
training people to grasp the notion of satori, then ungrasp it and have
the experience of satori, and is then assessing whether they have had
the experience - an assessment dominated by the Zen master. The only
'bad data' that are rebuffed are experiences that are not in line with
traditional experiential claims. Zen training, in its traditional
oriental form, is not a collaborative inquiry as to whether satori is
indeed what it claims to be. It is an hierarchical not a peer process.
It is not practising openness to experiential data that could falsify
or modify or lead to a reconceptualization of the satori claim.
Experential training versus experential inquiry. For me, John Heron seems to have the right of it, in conflating these two.
However I would like to inject a thought, perhaps more of a question.
This distinction - experiential training versus experiential inquiry is the essence of the distinction between modern intellectual inquiry and traditional intellectual inquiry.
Everyone reading this is most likely committed to this modern understanding of intellectual inquiry. Still, for balance, I would encourage everyone to read Rene Guenon, for an exigesis on the distinction. Especially The Crisis of the Modern World.
Herre's the thought. In the current world of experiential inquiry, the world is GIVEN. The world is here, "since beginningless time", to use the vendantin phrase. It is because of this givenness, this "hereness" of the modern world, that we can perform experiments on it, find out new stuff about it.
For traditional modes of spiritual experiential inquiry the word of the guru who KNOWS is considered the "givenness", in parallel to the physical world's "hereness". That's the bedrock against which to measure spiritual progress, the same way referencing the world that we are in is the bedrock to measuring technical, worldly progress.
This is a subtle distinction that I agree, Wilber SEEMS to conflate.
