Current location:	Willow Keep, 97477
Current mood:	accomplished
Entry tags:	correspondence, integral magick, ken wilber, magick book, writing -- rough

Regarding the Lack of Occultism in Wilber's Integral Model, and the Role of an Integral Magick
Someone emailed me a few weeks back with some questions regarding Wilber's model, it's conflict with occult worldviews, and the reconciliation of the two. The response was well worth sharing, as this is something I've been working towards writing anyway as I stuggle with the early chapters of my book. I imagine that I'll use some of this as rough material for more polished and better-supported thought in the book. For now, this is a good summary of my views.

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Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2006 21:18:32 -0700
From: "Fenwick Kaidevis Rysen" <kaidevis@gmail.com>
To: (cut)
Subject: Re: Integral Magick

On 6/1/06, (cut) wrote:
> I used to study and pratice with the HOGD until I discovered Ken Wilber.
> Then I intepreted magick through his lens as some kind of retroromantic
> regression to a pre-rational worldview. I see that you are informed by
> Wilber's work yet maintain the magickal worldview. I'm trying to reconcile
> the two and see you are working on a project called integral magick. Can you
> direct me to your written works on how you manage this? Thanks.


I am in the process of writing a book about it right now; I don't have any polished material regarding this available online yet. However, it's not very difficult for me to explain. Wilber claims to be putting forth a model of everything -- his integral model -- which explains anything and everything about human experience. However, what he has done is create a thorough model that shows us more about his understanding of psychology and eastern spirituality (personal interests/foci/biases) than it does about a truly "integral" world view.

As you note, he often (usually) treats magic or the belief in magic as "some kind of retroromantic regression to a pre-rational worldview." Specifically he is following in the footsteps of Freud and many other western psychologists in dismissing occultism merely as "infantile wish fulfilment." The argument is that it is an early stage of development (Wilber's Phantasmic-Emotional, or SDi "Purple" meme) and that a healthy individual should "grow out of it" because magic is not real.

There is good argument for the points he holds; a belief in magic is present at a certain point in childhood development, and in certain undeveloped ("primitive") cultures. It generally is a sort of infantile wish-fulfilment, or a yielding to forces of the world that simply are not yet fully understood by these people.

However, Wilber has ignored -- whether consciously or not -- the great mass of western spiritual traditions that deal with magick. It would be very difficult to take even the most cursory examination of the western magickal traditions without tripping all over some very high-level spiritual experiences analagous to those developed within eastern traditions. Scholars have been drawing parallels and distinctions between the occidental and oriental approaches ever since people began a worldwide trade of ideas.

For example, there is a working in magick known as "The Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel" which is a rather western mystical way of saying "How to contact your Higher Self and maintain a connection by which it informs and guides your life." Arguably the same goal as many eastern traditions, and often with similar results. The western Hermetic tradition is a body of wisdom philosophy stretching back almost two thousand years. And anyone who has studied or watched performed any amount of ritual magick by skilled practitioners would be able to tell you that the western ceremonial tradition has much to offer in obtaining nonordinary methods of consciousness, many of them higher consciousness of similar types pursued in the east (though magick has its own unique states worth study, as well.)

Wilber has, essentially, discarded all of the Western mystical and magickal tradition outside of a very small slice -- Christian mysticism (because he can't ignore it) and Qabala (because everyone knows about it; though he sticks to the rabbinical views). Everything else he ignores and does not address, filing it away under "Belief in magick: infantile". His study of western esotericism does not seem to contain *any* information about magick as it has existed within the past century -- by that standard (tossing out the last century's advances in theory and practice), *any* field of human endeavour could be easily devalued and ignored.

If I were to write my own book and only cover psychology as it existed up until the first years of the twentieth century, I would have missed all the excitement and definitely all of the relevant information. The same is true when psychologists such as Wilber write about magick and only bring their research about magick current to the nineteenth century. Magick has grown just as much.

At the same time Wilber supports his position that magick does not represent an "authentic" human experience and that magick is not real, he supports a belief in the siddhis or "powers" of yoga. A thorough study of the two shows a great many similarities between the powers gained by a siddha and the skills gained by a truly masterful magician. Many magicians in the western tradition actually begin their practice by following the practice regimens within yoga for developing siddhis. That one fact alone should merit attention; Wilber seems ignorant of it entirely.

Wilber also tends to drop shamanism out of the picture, too; it gets lumped in with magick all the same, even though it represents perhaps the longest continuing thread of authentic human spiritual experience the globe over. How he can say he's including everything and in the same breath dismiss shamanism is beyond me. Wilber has even said himself that one does not need to live in a highly developed culture to achieve highly developed spiritual states, which is exactly what shamanism shows us. Yet it gets discarded all the same. Perhaps we can understand this on the grounds of lumping it in with drugs, important to many (but most certainly not all!) shamanic rites; he tends to not address how drugs fit into his model at all, either, saying only on Kosmic Consciousness that he has friends who've gotten mileage out of entheogens (not the word he uses) but that he himself is almost entirely ignorant of them. (It also seems odd to me to create a model of human experience that does not include chemognostic states all the way from caffeinated tea to LSD; Wilber doesn't touch the topic.)

His model, though highly focused upon eastern visions of higher spirituality, even excludes some from the east as well. His treatment of Taoism, whenever it appears, is generaly brief and also ignores those aspects of it that don't fit in well with the integral model. For example, Taoism as well has a milleniums-long tradition of magick as well, that is considered an effecacious and necessary part of the stream of their tradition.

But before I continue to bash Wilber's model so much, I should play devil's advocate. It is actually rather easy to see how Wilber ended up in the position he has taken. Any psychologist worth his salt would see the masses who pursue magick and dismiss it as wish-fulfillment; that does not, however, address all those people who pursue magick quietly as an internal path to realization without need of external advertising.

Most of the easily available material on "magick" in the western tradition is, frankly, not flattering. It truly is infantile wish fulfillment; people who want to burn a candle and chant their way to wealth and fortune, when what they really need is a lesson in the twin dark arts of accounting and investing. People who want to believe they have the power to change their lives without actually going out and putting the hard work in. People who want an easy fix. People who want to "wave a magick wand" and have it all be better.

People who want to dress in black and festoon themselves with silver jewelry and generally "go against the establishment" make a highly visible presence. Everyone knows the type. And while that horde probably represents a significant fraction of self-identified magicians, it does *not* show the people who have taken the lessons of magick to heart and blend in with their surroundings. The people who flow with life. The people who are personally developed enough to have no need to impress others with arcane knowledge of things most people don't even know exist. Most of the truly skilled magicians I know are either very quiet about their practice, or entirely silent.

Once you have reached a certain point in the practice of magick you realize that it is far more easier to just keep to yourself and those who understand so that you don't end up: a) facing the (very valid) worry that people will devalue you for your belief in magick ("because it's not real"), and b) trying to explain it for the umpteenth time to someone with a shallow understanding of magick.

It is extremely important to note that in the west this current is called "occultism." To be occulted means to be hidden. It refers, generally, to the wisdom within the tradition. A cursory glance will not often turn up much. Deeper searches are likely to take you down false paths full of blinds. It is only when one chooses to walk the path with heart that the path begins to reveal itself, and others -- the truly skilled others you'd want to talk to -- that you find people to share the path and share their wisdom. The true wisdom one is truly after, the paths to get there, and the people who share those paths -- all are occulted from view.

So the basic summary of my viewpoint would be:

- Wilber has a very neat model, but like any model it is flawed. Like most comprehensive models, it tells us at least as much about the biases of its creator as it does about the world.

- Wilber tends to favor eastern views of high-level spiritual development, systematically ignores the western parallels. Shamanism, neopaganism, magick, and similar traditions are all dismissed without a thorough (or even cursory) examination.

- Wilber has systematically ignored the western wisdom traditions parallel with the eastern in favor of playing up the Freudian angle on magick as childish belief in things that aren't real. He accepts magick within one hemisphere (siddhis of yoga) while denying it in the
other (western hermetic/ceremonial current).

Much of the time Wilber simply ignores these things. He addresses them rarely, and when he does, they are labeled "early stages" of development and one is told to just forget them and move past them and get on with the business of enlightenment. Where Wilber often goes to
great lengths to examine a topic -- any and all topics -- in order to either fold them into his model or categorically show their irrelevance, he does neither with magick. His support is so weak here that he cannot rule them out of his model other than on the voice of authority and the support of the materialistic side of our culture that dismisses magick outright.

Wilber's model has a great many wonderful aspects to it. It truly is, I believe, a model worth studying. However, I do not find his model to be an accurate representation of the world. He cannot use his model to explain to me what it is that I am experiencing as a practitioner of magick. If I were to believe his model, all I've done is spent the last 12 years learning feel, see, and know things that aren't really there -- things my fellow magicians also feel, and see, and know. The support for Wilber's argument? Because Wilber says so, and lots of psychologist think magick isn't real. (But a lot of them do. It's unproven ground.)

I understand how many people are drawn to his model as complete and comprehensive; it shows them more of the world than they have experienced themselves. Among the crowds that I run in -- full of witches and magicians and shamans -- the general reaction to his model ranges from mild interest ("looks like he might be onto something") to out right disgust ("he hasn't even done his research before saying our beliefs are peurile!"). These people generally see aspects of human experience -- magickal states with which they are familiar -- completely lacking from his maps. And when you go looking for why it's not there, he says, "Because magick isn't real... Oh, but the siddhis are."

Among the people I know who lead more normal lives, their exposure to Wilber generally borders on religious rapture. I've watched at least a dozen people up close go Wilber-wild and fall head first into his integral cult without every questioning whether or not there's something the model might *not* explain. These people take Wilber's views on magick for their own without ever truly questioning the premises those beliefs lay upon. But that's life; that's how humans work.

Myself, I tend to jump paradigms. I have yet to find any attempt at an integral model that explains the world to me that I have witnessed myself. Wilber has done a better job than most, and thus I study him. I use his models where they make sense, and often use his terms to explain personal, cultural, and spiritual development to others. But where his models don't make sense I abandon them, and they make little sense in regards to magick. And that is why, I think, practitioners of magick have generally been nonplussed by his creation.

My personal answer has been to attempt a bigger model. However, I do not have a great interest at this point in my life of tackling all the broad material that one needs to tackle in order to deal with Wilber's topic. I have narrowed myself instead to creating an equivelant integral model of magick for worldwide practitioners regardless of traditions. Using the same premises, I have constructed a model that can explain every aspect of magickal consciousness from its most base (Freudian wish fulfillment) to its highest (pursuit of enlightenment and spiritual wisdom). The details of that model fill a great many of my notebooks (I can relate oh-so-well to Wilber's anecdotal stories of "all those damn yellow legal pads" that he works with) and will likely keep me busy through the end of 2007 sorting and writing it all down.

My hope is that the model I have created will allow a more open dialogue between people of different magickal beliefs by showing how it all fits within a common model, and how that integral magickal model fits in with a larger view of reality (like, oh, say, the integral model). No one model alone is ever sufficient, but perhaps someone will come afterwards who can fuse the two and rectify the flaws in both Wilber's system (known and obvious) and my own system (unknown and untested). More likely it would be another model -- showing another author's biases -- that offers another, incrementally better view of The Whole Enchilada (Life, the Universe, and Everything).

I read back through this and note that I have rambled a great deal. I hope I have answered some of your questions, those those are for the most part mutely stated in your letter: "I see that you are informed by Wilber's work yet maintain the magickal worldview. I'm trying to reconcile the two and see you are working on a project called integral magick. Can you direct me to your written works on how you manage this?"

I manage this mostly by not letting Wilber's fascinating model get in the way of my own personal experience of reality (that it is magickal, that magick exists, that magick can be worked, that magick is a valid spiritual path, that magick can offer enlightenment as good as anything else.)

I have not entirely reconciled the two -- hence the integral magickal model I have been creating -- but I spend time examining things carefully and sorting it out a bit more each day (and each chapter draft). Truth be told, I don't think the models can be reconciled while Wilber is alive, because so long as he is the final authority on his model it does not seem that magickal beliefs, practices, or experiences will be worked into it. So I've sucked it up and I'm trying to do my best on my own with what information I have. I compare notes with other magicians and refine. I contemplate.

I hope I've answered your questions. Please feel free to write me back with any questions I might have raised, or other questions you might have in this regard. If you are looking for futher resources online you may be interested to read some of the online work of M. Alan at

http://www.kheper.net/topics/Wilber

Alan is an occultist with a strong background and understanding in modern occult philosophy who has also been highly drawn to the works of Ken Wilber. He has several analyses of various points of Wilber's model and philosophy along with several of his own critiques about things like Wilber's failure to incorporate occultism into his model. Specifically, you might be interested in

http://www.kheper.net/topics/Wilber/no_occultism.html

which is one of the papers I am citing in my own book on the topic of Wilber's lack of space for occultism within his Integral model. Alan's insights into Wilber's model carry the clarity one would ask of an academic, with the magickal worldview one would find in an adept of the occult traditions. Alan also examines some other flaws in Wilber's model which need similar shoring up before it can come even close to truly being a "theory of everything."

Thank you for this opportunity to babble. I hope you find the information you're looking for. Best of luck to you.


In Life, Love, and Laughter
~Fenwick Kaidevis Rysen