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Ken Wilber’s Integral Vision: Supportive Evidence from Clinical Consciousness Research. Stanislav Grof, M.D.
Ken Wilber e la visione integrale : Elementi di prova a supporto della ricerca clinica sulla coscienza
1° Parte
In a series of books published over a period of two decades, Ken Wilber formulated a comprehensive and encompassing vision of reality that integrates in a very creative and imaginative fashion data from a broad spectrum of disciplines.
These range from cosmology, quantum-relativistic physics, biology, and systems theory through psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology to comparative religion, mythology, and philosophy.
In this impressive tour de force, he achieved what most mainstream scientists consider impossible and absurd.                                           He demonstrated that - properly understood - modern science and religion are not incompatible, but represent two complementary approaches to existence.
Although Ken’s ambitious vision encompasses the totality of existence, as suggested by the title of one of his books, A Brief History of Everything (Wilber 1996), it has a central core. It is the theory of the Great Chain of Being - the understanding of existence as a holoarchical system of levels or stages of the evolution of Spirit.
An integral part of this theory is the idea that all the levels of existence are manifestations of consciousness and are experientially available to the individual human psyche.
Ken’s writings thus show a significant overlap with the areas of my own lifelong interest, which is research of non-ordinary states of consciousness and transpersonal psychology.
My interest in non-ordinary states began rather abruptly in 1956 when, as a beginning psychiatrist, I participated in a psychedelic research project and had a very powerful LSD experience (Grof and Grof 1990).
In the last forty years, exploration of non-ordinary states, particularly their significant subgroup which I call ‘holotropic,' has been the primary focus of my professional work.
Examples of holotropic states are experiences induced by shamanic procedures and aboriginal mind-altering techniques, by systematic spiritual practice, psychedelic substances, and powerful forms of experiential psychotherapy.
Holotropic experiences also occur spontaneously in people undergoing psychospiritual crises (‘spiritual emergencies’).  I have been deeply interested in all forms of holotropic states of consciousness and have had important personal experiences in many of them.
However, most of my professional work has been in the areas of psychedelic therapy, holotropic  breathwork  and 'spiritual emergency’ (Grof 1980 and 1988, Grof and Grof 1990).
In psychedelic therapy, the non-ordinary states of consciousness are induced by chemical means, in ‘spiritual emergencies’ they develop spontaneously for unknown reasons in the middle of everyday life, and in holotropic breathwork they are facilitated by a combination of faster breathing, evocative music, and a specific form of focused body work.
In spite of the differences in the circumstances that trigger them, all these states share important common characteristics and have the same theoretical and practical implications.
Over the years, my theoretical interests and choice of literature have been guided  by my clinical observations and my personal experiences of holotropic states.
My primary concern has been to find a conceptual framework for a broad range of phenomena that seriously challenge current psychiatric theories and the monistic materialistic world view of Western science.
Ken Wilber approaches the same territory with a very different background and from a different angle.
He draws on his encyclopedic knowledge of literature from a variety of disciplines and on experiences from his own spiritual practice. His ultimate ambition is to formulate a new integrated vision of reality that would incorporate the best of hard sciences, psychology, religion, and philosophy.
Since an important criterion of a good theory is its compatibility with the facts of observation, the clinical material I have amassed in the course of the last four decades could serve as an interesting testing ground for Ken's conceptual framework.
On the one hand, it could provide independent supportive evidence for his ideas and, on the other hand, it might point to the areas where his theoretical concepts need to be refined or modified. In turn, the world view Ken has formulated certainly has the potential for providing a plausible philosophical context for my own findings. Since our first meeting many years ago at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, Ken and I have occasionally exchanged information in correspondence and personal conversations. These exchanges contained a healthy balance of mutual compliments and constructive criticism.
We have also addressed each other’s ideas in writing (Grof 1985, Wilber 1994, Rothberg and Kelly 1998). In the published material, we have focused almost exclusively on the areas in which our perspectives on certain issues differ from each other or seem to be in conflict.
Both Ken and I feel that this fact created a distorted impression of the relationship between our respective theories.                                 It put great emphasis on the differences and obscured the far-reaching correspondences that exist between the ways both of us see reality, consciousness, and the human psyche.
The extensive areas of our agreement are particularly significant in view of the fact that the vision we share represents a radical alternative to the views held by mainstream science. I would, therefore, like to use the opportunity presented by the publication of Ken’s collected writings to correct this impression and briefly outline the areas in which we have arrived at strikingly similar conclusions.
The first of these points of agreement is the recognition that it is in principle impossible to understand the nature of reality, if our quest remains limited to the information acquired by the ‘eye of flesh,’ which is to say by our physical senses and their extensions, such as the microscope or telescope.
Even if we also fully engage the ‘eye of reason’ and subject the sensory data to sophisticated intellectual analysis, we will be missing a significant part of the cosmic story.
A comprehensive approach to themystery of existence demands that we include information that is available only to the ‘eye of contemplation.’ Only such an approach can provide the missing information about areas of existe that are transphenomenal - that is not accessible to our senses in the ordinary or ‘hylotropic’ state of consciousness.
In my work, the evidence for the existence of these ordinarily hidden dimensions of reality comes from systematic study of a category of experiences that I call transpersonal. Some transpersonal experiences are related to elements that we know from our everyday life, but they show them in a radically new perspective.
In holotropic states, we can see the material reality around us as manifestation of creative divine energy and directly perceive the unity underlying the world of separate phenomena.
This experience that reveals the sacred or numinous dimension of everyday reality can be referred to as ‘experience of the immanent divine.’
I have also witnessed on countless occasions that transpersonal experiences can provide accurate new information about various elements of the material world, such as other people, animals, plants, and even inorganic materials and processes.
In holotropic states, we can even transcend the barrier of linear time and obtain information from other historical periods in the form of ancestral, racial, collective, phylogenetic, and past life experiences.
This information is acquired without the mediation of sensory organs, simply by direct apprehension in the course of experiential identification with various aspects of space-time.
Transpersonal experiences that can be called ‘experiences of the transcendental divine’ do not provide a different perspective on material reality or a new way of acquiring information about it, but reveal domains of existence about which we do not have in our ordinary state of consciousness any experiential evidence. It is thus not surprising that the pragmatic and materialistically oriented industrial societies deny their existence.
I have seen repeatedly that transpersonal experiences can provide accurate information about archetypal domains and figures from various mythologies that are not intellectually known to the experiencer.
This strongly suggests that the realms revealed by these experiences are ontologically real and provides empirical support for C. G. Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious.
The above observations from the research of holotropic states have important implications for understanding the nature of consciousness, its relationship to the human psyche, and its role in the universal scheme of things.
This is another area in which Ken and I have mutual agreement. Unfortunately, because of spatial considerations,
I have not been able to include personal accounts and case histories that would make the discussion of transphenomenal dimensions of reality more convincing. In this regard, I have to refer the interested readers to my earlier publications (Grof 1975, 1985, 1988, 1998).
In contrast with the monistic materialistic world view that sees consciousness as an epiphenomenon of matter, a product of the neurophysiological processes in the brain, my research suggests unequivocally that consciousness is a primary and further irreducible attribute of existence and is involved in all the levels  of the Great Chain of Being or is able to convincingly portray them.
This is also a fundamental metaphysical  assumption of Ken’s model.
Continua
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