From Burden of Self, Spring 2010

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Permanent?

Posted by Katie

While reading Be Here Now I very much enjoyed the crazy aesthetic ride that accompanied what was being said. The doodlings and drawings seemed to help what was trying to be communicated with words. I admittedly was very excited when I picked up The Integral Vision and having flipped through the pages a few times before starting it I thought to myself, 'ooooh pictures!' Though once I started reading the images seemed to pester whatever it is that was being said below or around, or even in the image for that matter. The charts and graphs seemed to work since, well, its kind of hard to visually muck up a graph.
Perhaps I was just in a bit of a mood when I first picked this up and it just happened to carry through, but it seemed poorly put together. For Ken Wilbur to have spent 230 pages explaining to his readers how important integrating and seeing the bigger picture is, it was pretty obvious to me that his designers didn't exactly take that notion to heart. The disjointedness that came from the design made it a difficult read for me. It seemed like his designers saw some of Mark Titchner's work and tried to poorly rip it off.
Okay, design rant aside.
My biggest resistance came to Wilbur's idea of the permanence of stages. 'And remember, because these are stages, you have attained them in a permanent fashion (39).' Permanent is a very strong word, and 'permanent' used in any relation to human beings is something that I find increasingly more hilarious and outrageous. Everything as far as I can tell in my short few years as a human being on this planet is fleeting in one way or another. The closest idea to permanence that I can really wrap my head around is tattoos. I love when people tell me that my tattoos will be there for the rest of my life. Will they? What if my arm gets cut off? It's still permanent, yes, it will probably still be on my arm. But my arm may not always be part of me, connected to me. How permanent is it then? It seems a silly notion to sell to others that attaining permanence is something within grasp of a human being.
The rest of this paragraph goes as follows,
'Before that happens, any of these capacities will be merely passing states: you will plug into some of them, if at all, in a temporary fashion--great peak experiences of expanded knowing and being, wondrous aha! experiences, profound altered glimpses into your own higher possibilities. But with practice, you will convert those states into stages, or permanent traits in the territory of you (39).'
I can't help but feel that it is cruel and unusual to put that notion into a persons head. Permanence is a nice idea... but then again a nice idea to one is not so nice to another. I'll let Wilbur keep his permanence, and I'll sit quietly and happily with the lack.