the Primary Substance

[marmalade]

Originally Posted by Snoopy

Wilber is on my list of To Read. Any particular recommendations? How about The Integral Vision: A Very Short Introduction to the Revolutionary Integral Approach to Life, God, the Universe, and Everything?
s.

I really haven't been reading much of Wilber recently. I've been reading some other Integral theorists and there are some integral forums I've been on.

I did somewhat recently read Integral Spirituality...

Amazon.com: Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World: Books: Ken Wilber

...which I enjoyed, but its his most recent ideas. It can be helpful to read one of his earlier books to get a more basic understanding, but its been too long since I've read his early books to recommend any of them in particular. Instead, I'd recommend some of the overviews written by some others:

Amazon.com: Where's Wilber At?: Ken Wilber's Integral Vision in the New Millennium: Books: Brad Reynolds

Amazon.com: Ken Wilber: Thought As Passion (Suny Series in Transpersonal and Humanistic Pyschology): Books: Frank Visser,Ken Wilber

Wilber might be the best introduction to integral theory as he is the one who has done the most to popularize it next to Aurobindo. I do like Spiral Dynamics a lot which is a model that Wilber uses, but it was developed by several other people before him. There are tons of other integral writers out there. I'd recommend exploring these sites:

INTEGRALWORLD.NET - EXPLORING THEORIES OF EVERYTHING

A New Integral Paradigm - A Metaphysical "Map" of Consciousness/Reality

Here is the site that Wilber and company started:

What's New on Integral Naked

[Snoopy]

thanks!

s.

[China Cat Sunflower]

Originally Posted by Bruno's logic

Questions,
How can there be space, matter and motion, gravity, electromagnetism and heat, life, thoughts and emotions, freewill, mind and spirit? What is the cause of these things? They are all connected but how? What is the one thing that exists that all of these things have in common? Are these things of God? What then does God exist in? “Did God Create himself? Did God create the space he exists in? Is it possible that there is one thing already existing that connects all of these things, God included, and is also the cause of all of these things?

Here's the problem:

Infinity is liar's paradox. Picture Escher's Drawing Hands. Which hand draws first? Neither and both. Forever. So where is the First Cause within an enclosed, fully networked, causal sphere like the logical world within the Drawing Hands? It must be a quantum leap in perspective away, outside the world contained within the drawing, in the artist's perspective. We can leap back and forth between these two perspectives easily. In order to make the illusion of infinity work there has to be an essential discontinuity that separates the inviolate perspective from outside the paradox: that of the artist eye view, from the self-referential "logic" of a point of view immersed within the drawing. One cannot climb out of such a paradox from within because there's never a last or first hand. It's hands all the way up and down to infinity. That's where the illusion of a closed causal system begins. There is a similar discontinuity which separates the classical and quantum "worlds." Our reality sphere seems to be a self contained causal system, but that is an illusion created by the self-referential nature of the paradox. Like the hands drawing each other, the First Cause in a classical system can never be found within the system. Godel demonstrated that any attempt to create a paradox-free mathematical system is doomed to fail if that system is reasonably complex. Any system of reasonable richness can either be complete but inconsistent, or consistent but incomplete, but never both.

Chris