Sunday, May 22, 2005
Another depression due to a sudden sense of total loss of membership in an online forum. But it lifts thanks to a cool new idea in density estimation. Thank God for these sudden appearances of fresh ideas exactly when you are down and out.
Which brings me to Ken Wilber. Is there a brighter and more driven soul on this planet right now? I don't think so except perhaps for David Chalmers. Reading one or the other has always helped me get out of any depression that I'm in. Wilber is a true rarity - a geekmystic - and since I'm a geek myself, just reading and re-reading Wilber has helped me transform. I started reading Wilber with _The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes_ and I still get flashes of being hit by a thunderbolt as I read that book. The way Wilber went back and forth between Whitehead, Sankara, Mahayana Buddhism, etc. and with that utterly fluent and almost poetic quality that he still possesses, wow. And to think that the book came out in 1984 or so, more than twenty years ago. That book was a unit step function for me. Before reading it, I was sorta an atheist, after reading it, the theist/atheist distinction no longer mattered. It was gone. It is not that I became a theist after reading the book. Rather, the distinction itself became completely irrelevant. From time to time, I would get disturbed by having this intellectual guru and would try to transcend him by reading Grof, Derrida, David Ray Griffin, Huston Smith, Trungpa Rinpoche, Aurobindo and Whitehead. Just when I thought that Wilber could not handle deconstruction, he came out with _Sex, Ecology, Spirituality_. Just when I thought that he could not handle panpsychism, he came out with _Integral Psychology_. And his new pan-perspectivism will undoubtedly help us move toward a mature and finally new theory of consciousness. Wilber blows away all these partial and fragmented pseudo-intellectuals who still litter the landscape today.
Which brings me to Ken Wilber. Is there a brighter and more driven soul on this planet right now? I don't think so except perhaps for David Chalmers. Reading one or the other has always helped me get out of any depression that I'm in. Wilber is a true rarity - a geekmystic - and since I'm a geek myself, just reading and re-reading Wilber has helped me transform. I started reading Wilber with _The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes_ and I still get flashes of being hit by a thunderbolt as I read that book. The way Wilber went back and forth between Whitehead, Sankara, Mahayana Buddhism, etc. and with that utterly fluent and almost poetic quality that he still possesses, wow. And to think that the book came out in 1984 or so, more than twenty years ago. That book was a unit step function for me. Before reading it, I was sorta an atheist, after reading it, the theist/atheist distinction no longer mattered. It was gone. It is not that I became a theist after reading the book. Rather, the distinction itself became completely irrelevant. From time to time, I would get disturbed by having this intellectual guru and would try to transcend him by reading Grof, Derrida, David Ray Griffin, Huston Smith, Trungpa Rinpoche, Aurobindo and Whitehead. Just when I thought that Wilber could not handle deconstruction, he came out with _Sex, Ecology, Spirituality_. Just when I thought that he could not handle panpsychism, he came out with _Integral Psychology_. And his new pan-perspectivism will undoubtedly help us move toward a mature and finally new theory of consciousness. Wilber blows away all these partial and fragmented pseudo-intellectuals who still litter the landscape today.
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