Quest Magazine

 by Peter Michel
Bluestar Communications, Woodside, CA. 1995; 205 pages.

This year is the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Jiddu Krishnamurti (May 12, 1895; d. February 17, 1986). The appearance of Peter Michel' s book is therefore timely, doubtless one of many publications we can anticipate in this centennial year.

Michel's work is an excellent introduction to Krishnamurti's life, teachings, and Theosophical connections. Distinctive in several ways, it is likely to stand apart from the crowd of other commemorative studies and appreciations. Although adopting a "friendly" approach, the author looks at certain apparent contradictions and ironic contrasts in Krishnamurti's teachings, there cognition of which is part of the meaning of the " Mystery" in the book's subtitle.

Michel emphasizes the coherence of Krishnamurti's work, from At the Feet of the Master to the last works, such as the Journal (1982) and the Last Talks at Saanen 1985, and also the connection of Krishnamurti's thought with the Theosophical context in which he was fostered and against which he rebelled. For example, Michel points to the following passage from At the Feet of the Master,Krishnamurti's first and most Theosophical book:

There are in the world many untrue thoughts, many foolish superstitions, and no one who is enslaved by them can make progress. Therefore you must not hold a thought just because many other people hold it nor because it has been believed for centuries, nor because it is written in some book which men think sacred; you must think of the matter for yourself, and judge for yourself whether it is reasonable. Remember that though a thousand men agree upon a subject, if they know nothing about that subject their opinion is of no value. He who would walk upon the Path must learn to think for himself, for superstition is one of the greatest evils in the world, one of the fetters from which you must utterly free yourself. [61]

The rejection of authority in that passage and its emphasis on self- reliance and independence might as well have been written at the end of Krishnamurti's life as in his early years.

Krishnamurti's distinctive aversion to systems and organizations is one of the apparent contradictions in his life and teachings. After he dissolved the Order of the Star in the East in 1929, his rejection of systematic teachings and organizations promoting them became a major theme. His later creation of the Krishnamurti Foundation to perpetuate his own teachings is seen as something quite different. That organization is merely to assure that "the Teaching" remains available, and the organization is expressly forbidden to interpret it. To an outsider, however, such an organization may appear to be designed to preserve the orthodoxy of Krishnamurti's views and to inhibit their normal evolutionary development and adaptation to changing times and thus to foster a view of them as absolute, infallible or inerrant Truth.

In giving his talks, Krishnamurti often would say, "Let us look into this together," or the like. However, as Michel observes, real dialogue is conspicuously lacking; such apparent invitations were rhetorical introductions to a monologue. Krishnamurti also typically spoke on high levels of abstraction about "love," "fear," and so on. In that way, his discourse is strikingly different from that of the Great Teachers of the past like Christ and the Buddha.

Christ spoke in parables, little stories about ordinary, everyday people and events: about a traveler who was attacked by thieves, about servants who managed their boss’s property well or ill, about guests at a wedding feast, about a father's love for a wayward son, and so on. Similarly when poor Kisa Gotami asked the Budd ha to restore her dead child to life, he did not give her a talk about life and death and suffering and acceptance. He told her he would do what she asked if she could bring him mustard seed from a house where no one had ever died. The Great Teachers of the past have spoken in concrete, immediate terms on the level of the people. Krishnamurti spoke in the rhetoric of abstraction. As Emily Lutyens wrote to Krishnamurti:

You seem surprised that people do not understand you but I should be far more surprised if they did!! After all, you are upsetting everything in which they have ever believed –knocking out their foundations and putting in its place a nebulous abstraction. [127-28, quoted from Krishnamurti- His Life and Death. [85]

Krishnamurti could be clear and practical. That side of him is well shown in an observation reported by Susunaga Weeraperuma: "Always be skeptical of persons who claim to have clairvoyance. It is not that clairvoyance does not exist. It certainly exists. But doesn't it feed your vanity to believe that you have gifts lacking in others?" (162, quoted from Krishnamurti As I Knew Him, 153).

Krishnamurti could also inspire and motivate others to a loyalty to himself and a conviction of his spiritual status. There is abundant evidence of that, including Michel's own obvious high regard for Krishnamurti. But such inspiration seems to have come generally not from Krishnamurti's writings or talks-" the Teaching"-but rather chiefly from personal contact with him. It is another irony that, despite Krishnamurti's efforts to direct attention away from himself and toward "the Teaching," it was his personal charisma that affected the lives of others. People were drawn to him, but not transformed by "the Teaching."

Whether Krishnamurti is right or wrong about the possibility of radical transformation, neither he nor "the Teaching" gives much help in achieving it. He says that the first step is "to understand profoundly the significance of our existence" (54), but that is also the goal. Krishnamurti offers no way for achieving such understanding, and he dismisses traditional methods of approaching it. The fact that Krishnamurti says the ultimate goal is the first step is, in one sense, a profound truth. Blavatsky often talked that way too, but she also provided practical suggestions about what to do. Paradox without praxis makes a thin soup.

Although Krishnamurti himself tried to separate his person from "the Teaching,” ultimately they are inseparable. The content of Krishnamurti's teaching is not his; it is part of the timeless Wisdom Tradition. But the form in which it is set forth, its rhetoric and its focus, are distinctively Krishnamurti's. As Michel says, "Mystical experiences determined Krishnamurti's entire life and cannot be separated from his teachings. It is a radical and distorting contraction to reduce Krishnamurti's being to the factual message of his talks" (163). For that reason, anyone interested in Krishnamurti's teachings must sooner or later attend to his life.

Krishnamurti's life falls into discrete periods. Born in 1895 in southern India, like his namesake Krishna, he was an eighth child. Discovered by clairvoyant observation of his aura by C. W. Leadbeater in 1909, when he was fourteen, Krishnamurti was tagged as the "vehicle" of the World Teacher. That is, a great spiritual individual who had earlier manifested as the Christ and other spiritual teachers was supposed to "overshadow" Krishnamurti by using his body to communicate with humanity.

There was no thought among Theosophists of Krishnamurti himself being the World Teacher; he was merely to be the channel through which the World Teacher would speak. And that was the way things seemed to be developing for the next sixteen or so years. For example, in 1925 in a talk at Adyar to the Order of the Star in the East, which had been established to prepare for the manifestation of the World Teacher, Krishnamurti's voice seemed to change at one point and he began to speak in the first person as the World Teacher instead of in the third person about him. It appeared to some observers that the World Teacher had "taken over" for a brief period.

The year 1925 was however, a crucial one in Krishnamurti's life, marking the end of his first and explicitly Theosophical phase. Michel suggests that two events of that year were especially important for the change which was to come. First was the "nonsense of Huizen." A group of prominent Theosophists at a Theosophical retreat in the Dutch town of Huizen seem to have participated in a collective hysteria in which they imagined that various of their members were being rapidly initiated into advanced levels of spiritual accomplishment. The aging Annie Besant was present at the time but was perhaps already falling into a condition of incompetence that prevented her from putting a stop to the foolishness. C. W. Leadbeater, who was in Australia, did his best to undo the harm after the fact , but was hampered from direct action by his respect for Besant. Krishnamurti, despite his later view that instantaneous enlightenment is possible, did not regard the participants in that event as enlightened beings but found some of them manipulative. He was much upset at the proceedings, Michel believes, because certain matters he regarded as sacred were made to appear ridiculous.

The second crucial event of 1925 was the death of Krishnamurti's brother, Nitya, who had suffered for some while from tuberculosis. Krishnamurti understood from a dream that he had the promise of the Masters that Nitya would get well, but while on a sea journey to Adyar, he received news of his brother's death. The combination of his dislike of certain prominent Theosophists who behaved foolishly and his loss of confidence in the Masters to make all things right led to a crisis, a turning point in Krishnamurti's life.

Thereafter Krishnamurti moved out of a conventional Theosophical worldview and talked about a mystical and less structured sense of oneness with all life and the rejection of all authority and tradition. In 1929 he disbanded the Order of the Star in the East, which had been created for him but was imbued with traditional Theosophical attitudes and beliefs. Eventually Krishnamurti claimed that he him self had achieved oneness with the Ground of Being. As he wrote in a 1932 letter to Emily Lutyens: "I have revolutionized myself!! I can't tell you, mum, what a glorious thing it is to have realized the highest and the most sublime thing" (51, quoted from Krishnamurti-the Years of Fulfillment, 23). From that point on, Krishnamurti presented himself not as the vehicle or mouthpiece of the World Teacher, but as one who had independently achieved the Mystical Union and who could therefore speak of the Real in his own voice and by his own right.

Krishnamurti appears to have been not one, but several persons. There is the young Krishnamurti, nurtured and conditioned by his Theosophical mentors. There is the rebellious and publicly austere Krishnamurti, overthrowing his Theosophical traces and rejecting all authority, teaching ends without means. There is the esoteric Krishnamurti, healing the sick with his hands, describing nature spirits that frolic in the waves, and exorcising the dark powers that sometimes intruded into his life. There is the charismatic Krishnamurti who appeared to many to be just what he claimed: one who had realized his unity with the source of life and who was therefore free from limitations but boundlessly loving and considerate of others.

But there is also the manipulative, dishonest, self-centered Krishnamurti of Radha Rajagopal Sloss's Lives in the Shadows, a Krishnamurti who had a decades-long affair with the wife of his business manager, was involved with the abortions of her pregnancies by him, and eventually fell out with the other man in the ménage a trois. The last Krishnamurti is one that sympathetic biographers tend to ignore or dismiss, but he will not go away. No Krishnamurti biographer has yet adequately come to terms with Sloss's book.

The existence of so many Krishnamurtis raises the question of who the real Krishnamurti was. Per haps Theosophical psychology is as good a vantage point as any for viewing the mystery of "the often extreme bifurcation in Krishna's private behavior and his public message" (Sloss, 102). Each of us is a transcendent individuality that expresses itself in a series of reincarnated personalities.

The personality of Krishnamurti was molded by the conditions around it and behind it. It was as fluctuating and conditioned as any other personality and less morally responsible than many. Behind the personality, however, was an individuality (called Alcyone in early Theosophical literature), which C. W. Leadbeater recognized. It was the source of the charisma to which so many responded. The various Krishnamurtis are mixtures in varying proportions of aspects of the flawed personality and the inspiring individuality.

The value of Krishnamurti's life and teaching cannot yet be assessed with confidence, partly because his influence reaches into distant and sometimes unexpected corners of modern life. Radha Burnier, the inter national president of the Theosophical Society, has suggested one value Krishnamurti has had for the Society, which identified him, nurtured him, formed him, and from which he parted with bad grace. She writes:

HPB warned that most organizations like ours do not survive for more than one hundred years. Generally they become encrusted with dogma and degenerate into some kind of sectarianism. The members tend to rest upon the oars of their past achievements, giving little attention 10 discovery and action in the present. If the Theosophical Society has escaped such a fate, it is in large measure due to Krishnaji's questioning and criticism. This may not have pleased all members of the Theosophical Society, but nonetheless it helped to restore vitality to the pursuit of the fundamental aims of the society. [189, quoted from The American Theosophist, fall 1987, 345]

It is certainly true that Theosophists have had a love/dread relationship with Krishnamurti from the beginning and many still do, just as it is true that Krishnamurti's life and teachings were intimately bound up with the existence and teachings of the Theosophical Society. His presence and his words have been an energizing force for many Theosophists, and his influence on the organizational and intellectual history of the Society is a story not yet completed. Whether that influence could lead to a different sort of dogma and sectarianism is a possibility not to be discounted. There is a tendency to idealize Krishnamurti, to find in him a de facto World Teacher, and to repress his shadow side.

Krishnamurti is indeed a mystery, some aspects of which are likely to remain forever unapproached.
-JOHN ALGEO

Autumn 1995

 edited by Christopher Bamford
Lindisfarne Press, Rochester, Vt.; paper.

The title, subtitle, and a summary of subjects addressed (form, number, geometry, architecture, light, color, music, poetry) effectively describe the contents. Sacred art and architecture put us in touch with the divine. Genuine sacred art can only be produced through sacred science. This was the science of the ancients, a science no less sophisticated and advanced than our own, but directed toward very different values.

Unless our emotional faculties have been utterly destroyed by modern education, it is impossible not to respond to sacred art. But knowing why we respond is a first step toward reacquiring that great, lost wisdom. Homage to Pythagoras is hardly bedtime reading, but anyone interested in understanding that "why" will find the effort expended amply repaid.

-JOHN ANTHONY WEST

Summer 1995

 by Ma Jaya Sali Bhagavali
Ganga Press, Roseland, Fla., 1994; hardcover, xiii +85 pages.

It is tempting to call epic a poem that fills 85 pages and takes about 75 minutes to read a loud, especially one that addresses the panorama of life and death. But The River is intimate by nature, and is not intended to impress with the immensity of what it describes but to reveal in fleeting moments the ineffable stillness of the spirit.

The first seven lines announce what is to become the recurring motif: 

Children play by my River
Sadhus stay by my River
Cities old by my River
Temples made of gold by my River
Cows stray all the day by my River
Young men and women now die
by my River
We are all the widows who cry
by my River

 Those ideas recur no fewer than thirty-two times in whole or more often in part as a leitmotif, always recognizable but never quite the same. The poem flows rhapsodically, unfettered either by metrical regularity, strict rhyming scheme, or end-of-line punctuation. The seemingly naive sense of rhyme is one of several characteristics that give The River its flavor. The rhyme may shift suddenly to midline and signal a change of direction. Free association suggests the river's course and creates palpable, sensuous impressions of flowing, cresting, and subsiding. Whether mighty and sonorous or hushed and whispered, the expression is both unpretentious and mystical, calling to mind another poet of divine vision, William Blake.

The author's introduction declares her purpose "to bring to the many the beauty of my River, the Ganga-the sacredness of her abundance, the joy of her waters, and the fact that her holiness can and does heal ... sorrow in this time of the AIDS plague." As founder and spiritual head of the transdenominational Kashi Ashram in Roseland, Florida, Ma Jay Sari Bhagnavati directs her ministry of service for the most part toward society's marginalized, including many HIV-positive people and AIDS patients.

Much of the poem presents imagery of death that might appear horrific to the Western sensibility-corpses burning in the cremation ground, the smell of charred flesh mingling with the scents of jasmine and musk, ashes set afloat upon the river's breast, the black goddess Kali's fearsome dance. The pictorial realism evokes heat and sunlight, the mystery of night, the teeming life along the river's banks at play and at prayer, in joy, ill sorrow, and in release. The river becomes a metaphor for the totality of being, which enfolds life and death together. It presents the naked facts of temporal existence-of birth, growth, maturation, decay, and death, and all their attendant pleasure and pain-in the context of that larger reality, call it God or Brahman. The poem conveys the joy of embracing all of life's aspects and living passionately with fearlessness. The Ganges is also personified as the mother goddess, and finally it is revealed as transcendental reality itself.

Descriptive passages, dialogue, storytelling, allusions to myth, exhortation, and praise present the richness of Shaivite and Tantric Hinduism with an admixture of Zenlike immediacy. The poet speaks through various voices as an observer on the river's bank, a child, an ascetic, and soon, culminating in ecstatic identification with the divinity that the river represents.

Purists may object to four instances of split infinitives, to a pronoun in the wrong case, to two misuses of the word "lay" for "lie," and one occurrence of "piers" where "pyres" is meant. In addition there is a reference to Brahma, the god of creation, where Brahman, the formless reality, is meant. These, however, are minor details that can be corrected in a future printing. More troubling is the unexplained alternation of the Sanskrit "Ganga" (nominative) and "Gange" (vocative) throughout the poem without regard to grammatical sense. The allusions to Hindu myths do not always make themselves sufficiently clear and seem to assume the reader's previous knowledge of the stories. Also, a glossary would have been helpful to those who may not be familiar with the Sanskrit and other Indian terms employed.

Much care has been lavished on the book's design: it is clothbound in black and stamped with gold, with deep red endpapers and rich ivory stock. A Shiva trident symbol head s each page of text, and headbands and a bound-in red ribbon bookmark add to the impression of quality. The glossy 'black dust jacket bears a glowing, full-color reproduction of a painting by the author, who has won critical acclaim for the power of her naturalistic, primitive canvases. The River is a book to be cherished and read again and again.

-DAVID NELSON

Summer 1995

 by Ken Wilber
Shambhala Publications/Random House, New York, 1994; hardcover, 816 pages.

A long time ago, human beings lived in perfect harmony with nature and each other. We were not alienated. We did not abuse the planet. No one dominated anyone. We lay down with lion and lamb and every thing was bliss. Then something happened. Call it original sin. In any case, the honeymoon was over. The primal split, the ancient rift, the great gulf between ourselves and the cosmos opened and we were unceremoniously kicked out of the garden. Since then everything has been a mess.

In one version or another, this is a standard new age criticism of the modem epoch. It is also a feminist indictment of patriarchal oppression, an environmentalist assessment of the root of our ecological crisis, or any combination of the above. Ken Wilber's massive new work is an unrelenting attack on this simplistic fairy tale and an incisive analysis of its influence on contemporary social, cultural, and spiritual thought. Wilber has thought long and hard about the state of spirituality, and has concluded that many of its cherished icons and deeply held beliefs are not quite what they seem. His reasons are spelled out in exhaustive detail in the book's densely packed pages, a good 250 of which make up notes to the text.

Wilber is at pains to make clear why he finds the stereotypic anti-modern, anti-masculine, anti-progress critiques unsatisfying, bending over backwards to qualify his reservations with strings of parenthetical remarks. Yet if there is one definite statement to make about this exciting, frustrating, and challenging work, it is this: he will not make many friends with it, a sure sign he is onto something significant.

Wilber's basic theme is that our late twentieth -century intellectual and spiritual milieu is dominated by what he calls a "Descender” worldview, essentially a vision of life that denies the transcendent dimension and that sees the whole of reality in the physical world of the senses. Here we find strange bedfellows. Postmodernists, deconstructionists, reductionists, scientists, feminists, masculinists, "eco-fascists," devotees of the "new physics," and systems theorists all carve out different portions of what Wilber calls the "flat-land cosmology" of the Descender universe. An opposite, though less prevalent. camp is made up of the "Ascenders:” adherents of world- rejection. These include Gnostics, Cathars, Manichaeans, some Platonists, pessimists, like Schopenhauer, Theravadin Buddhists, archetypal psychologists, and an assortment of various "higher self" aficionados.

Both groups are guilty of a tragic partiality. in Wilber 's view, Descenders err by sinking into the physical cosmos in hopes of reaching a false totality: Ascenders by rejecting the physical plane in pursuit of "other worlds:” Both, Wilber argues, are halves of a fractured worldview that bridges the gulf between world-affirmation and world-rejection. He finds a uniting worldview for this split in Plotinus and Friedrich Schelling in the West, in Sri Aurobindo and Nagarjuna in the East. Sex, Ecology, Spirituality traces the sources and analyzes the effects of this debilitating bifurcation across the vast canvas of human history. Understandably, Wilber pays particular attention to the postmodern era, a time when the two opposing camps have at least a chance of coming together-or, equally likely, of recoiling even further apart in a schizoid polarization of the human spirit.

Wilber 's scope is ambitious, nothing less than from the Big Bang to the present era, and he is equally at home with new age gurus or postmodern pundits. The backbone of the work is the idea of "the holon,” a coinage made by Arthur Koestler in his 1967 classic The Ghost in the Machine. Wilber adopts Koestler's concept of "whole/parts" as the basic structural components of reality. Drawing from the work of philosophers Jurgen Habermas, Jean Gebser, and Michel Foucault, as well as the psychologist Jean Piaget, he embarks on a less-than-straightforward narrative of the evolution of the cosmos, life, mind, and civilization. That evolution, according to Wilber, has suffered from the Ascender /Descender split for a good 2,300 years. Wilber concentrates on unraveling the psychological and ontological knots these opposite outlooks have tied in our understanding of ourselves and the universe. In an era of postmodern free-for-alls and deconstructive double-think. Wilber has his work cut out for him. So do his readers.

What Wilber finds lacking in today's worldview is the notion of hierarchy, the Great Chain of Being that for centuries was the accepted vision of "the way things were." Nowadays, hierarchy is a bad word, smacking, for the politically and cosmologically correct, of dominance, oppression, and male superiority. Yet, as Wilber makes amply clear, the various critics of hierarchy confuse its abuse with its genuine character. Their "heterarchic" alternatives share a common flaw: by emphasizing the equal significance of all perspectives, they wind up affirming that anyone perspective is as good as any other, a stance that lands them in a mire of relativism. Confusing "pathological dominator hierarchies," which should be opposed, with authentic levels of Being, the various opponents of the Great Chain-whether deconstructionists, radical feminists, animal rights activists, or cultural relativists---end up with a flatland cosmology that, Wilber contends, confuses broader, though more superficial, "span" with deeper "depth."

The various "holistic" cosmologies and systems theory approaches 10 the environment gel short shrift from Wilber. Although they have indeed "shown that everything is connected to everything else," what they fail to include in their" interlocking systems" is the transpersonal dimension, the realm of value. This cannot be accounted for in holistic cosmologies that base their gauge of significance on size rather than depth. Most of these theorists are of the "bigger is better" school, Wilber argues. They ignore the obvious architectonics of the cosmos: galaxies are unimaginably large entities, enjoying an immense span, yet they are relatively simple. The human brain is a rather small object, cosmically speaking, yet it is infinitely more complex than a galaxy. And as far as we know, it houses perhaps the deepest thing in existence, the mind.

Holistic thinkers err in claiming that because it is more fundamental, the biosphere-the realm of organic life- is more significant than the noosphere- the realm of mind. For Wilber the precise opposite is true. If "the ultimate character pervading the universe is a drive toward the endless production of new syntheses," he tells us, then the holists have their priorities wrong . The noosphere isn't in the biosphere; the biosphere is in the noosphere-embraced, transcended, yet retained. Yet "because evolution is not bigger and better, but smaller and better (greater depth, less span) these theorists ... end up unknowingly recommending regression as our salvation."

Some theorists do not recommend regression unknowingly. Another of Wilber's bêtes noires are the various Romantic schools that have cropped up in the last decade or so. These include the men's movement, eco-feminism, various shamanistic "ways," the "archaic revival," and others. Each school adheres to some version of the "Great Crime," a rundown of which began this review. Each vies with the others in attempting to push back the clock to humanity's supposed pure and pristine participation with nature. Eco-feminists see it in the horticultural age: eco-masculinists, with hunters and gatherers.

The Great Crime of our separation from Mother Earth has led to alienation and oppression, these theorists claim, so, according to Wilber, they hop into their "Way Back Machines" or onto "The Regress Express," in order to return to Day One. Wilber appreciates the value of their sentiments, but says "it is one thing to remember and embrace and honor our roots; quite another to hack off our leaves and branches and celebrate that as a solution to leaf rot."

Seeing as much danger in Romantic regression as in rationalist reduction, Wilber doesn't hesitate to point out some of the questionable aspects of such grand men of alternative thought as C. G. Jung and Joseph Campbell. In Jung's archetypes he finds not the numinous symbols today's Jungians do, but a collection of fairly typical, earthbound experiences. Wilber agrees that it is important to embrace these subliminal, prepersonal spheres, but denies that they have anything to do with higher, spiritual planes. (He makes a similar criticism of Stanislav Grof's "Basic Perinatal Matrices") Campbell's work in mythology, Wilber argues, suffers from a hermeneutical confusion. In rejuvenating myth as an alternative to modern rationality, Campbell fails to realize that his appreciation of ancient myths is very different from that of the people for whom myths were a matter of course. Campbell, Wilber tells us, had the benefit of reasoning about the myths, the very quality he is eager to deflate. Jung and Campbell are not the only recipients of Wilber's extensive critique; I mention them only to give an idea of the not-so-cozy corners one is led to in reading (his book.

Although unquestionably a tour de force, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality isn't without its weaknesses. Wilber 's style is breathlessly abstract , and the ubiquitous qualifications break up the narrative flow. And when he leaves his occasionally impenetrable academese, he often descends into chummy argot ("French kissing the Shadow") or ascends into lofty, though nebulous, rhetoric. Having agreed with and appreciated his razor-job on some of our more muddle-headed ideologies, I was less than convinced by his own conclusions.

Having shown up the flaws of Ascenders and Descenders alike, Wilber rolls out his own version of "how things are." Yet more often than not, this is announced in a voice of such singing, almost childlike yearning that, while I had no trouble detecting the emotion, I can't say I came away clear on the ideas. I believe they are there; Wilber is no mean thinker, but perhaps his very urgency blocks straightforward expression. (And having Hegel, Habermas, and Da Free John as spiritual mentors does not ensure a limpid style.) One also wonders about schematizing consciousness. In a closing note, Wilber remarks that when Jean Gebser said that Jesus and Meister Eckhart embodied the "integral structure" (Gebser's term for the newly emerging next phase of human evolution), he was "far short of the mark," and then goes on to state that " beyond" the integral are "the psychic, the subtle, the causal, and the ultimate." This may very well be true, but it did remind me of P. D. Ouspensky's reply to the lady who asked him if the Buddha was the "seventh level of consciousness." "I don't know," Ouspensky replied. "And I don't care."

Without criticizing legitimate hierarchies, the concrete reality of human experience is lost in these abstract pecking orders. Likewise, Wilber's Ascender/Descender motif, though a handy and wieldy tool, is so broad as to include everybody not partial to his take on things. And is everyone either an Ascender or Descender? I can think of at least half a dozen individuals who might find a spot in both camps.

Nevertheless, these quibbles aside, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality is an important book. It is bracing to see a writer associated with "fringe" fields of thought taking on the whole spectrum of late twentieth century culture. If this is Wilber's attempt at a crossover book, it's a good shot. After slapping the wrists of some of the most popular alternative thinkers, Wilber is sure to offend a great many readers, yet this kind of criticism is a tonic. Whether we agree with his assessment or not-and as this is the first of a projected mammoth trilogy we must keep an open mind-this book challenges us to rethink our beliefs in the company of the great books.

-GARY LACHMAN

Summer 1995