It takes awareness and discipline to divorce oneself from the prevalence of the mainstream’s acceptance of the ascending line of personal and spiritual growth as paramount, and the descending line as suspect. With the growth of postmodern and participatory thought and the contributions of transpersonal...
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...
I’ve written and spoken frequently about the impossibility of finding love when lost in “the projection of the Dream Lover,” -- not a phrase I commonly use but was thusly stated by one of the characters in Antero Alli’s spellbinding, evocative film The Alchemy of...
BY JAMIE DUCHARME MARCH 14, 2023 1:24 PM EDTWhen Joe, 37, and his wife tried MDMA together for the first time two years ago, he expected to “let loose a little bit and have fun.” Instead, they talked about the trash: why Joe didn’t take it out...
Listed out like this, the very idea of a descending and inferior line development appears absurd to the postmodern sensibility. This schemata was assured to crack, and crack it did with the introduction of Jorge Ferrer’s (2002) seminal work, Revisioning transpersonal theory: a participatory vision...
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...