It is helpful is to compare these two lines of development for a fuller understanding. Daniels (2021, p. 29) provides an excellent graph that summarizes what Wilber calls the ascending and descending currents (a new term which replaced his previous use of the word line)....
An example of a highly developed spirituality that grew and flourished under a non-white, non-hierarchy is the African lineage as presented by Bynum (1992). This culture can be traced back to at least the beginnings of the Egyptian civilization, also known as Kemet. This transmission...
The conventional world has been taught to see these processes and worldviews as strange, less sophisticated, and less evolved. Until recently, spirituality itself was suspect. The film industry, although it has made slight progress, still promotes widely the stories of white men and their adventures...
The very idea of a descending line comes from the concept that spirit descends from the heavens to the earth, which is the wrong direction according to the major patriarchal religions. Heaven is good, and earth is bad. Heaven is good; body is bad. When...
In his early work, Wilber contrasted various paths of personal and spiritual development as of which he termed the ascending line. He created graphs comparing the work of Piaget, Aurobindo, Grof, Buddhism, Kohlberg, Maslow, Vedanta, the chakra system, and others (note: all lines developed by...
In the early days of transpersonal psychology the works of Ken Wilbur, in particular The Spectrum of Consciousness (1977) and No Boundary (1979), were considered basic texts, and the concepts they offered were novel and inspiring. Wilber is a genius at synthetization, and these books...
In his early works Ken Wilber created a schema of personal and spiritual development in which all psychological and spiritual paths were placed into either an ascending or descending current, later named “vectors” by Daniels (2005), and ranked by Wilber in terms of his assessment...
Charles Tart (2008) offers his view that if transpersonal psychologists want to understand various esoteric systems and altered states of consciousness, it is “helpful but not enough” (p. 137) to study their books and traditions. These systems were created as state-specific knowledge bases, and as...
When looking at mysticism this week, Jorge Ferrer reminds us in his video interview that there are many types of mysticism, that they are not all describing the same states, and that all should be respected. Newberg (2018) has identified four core components at the...
Early feminist theorists posited that the main difference in female psychology from male is its emphasis on relationality and the interconnectedness of human experience. Brooks (2013) writes about the differences in the experiences of women being vastly underrepresented in transpersonal as well as mainstream psychology,...