The first half is better than the last half anyway.
Not sure I drink the kool-aid on the whole second tier thing, but I admire the enormity of his mission....to make a coherent whole out of so many different things. The guy has read a lot more than most people, and he has a pretty good map laid out. I like the Spiral Dynamics explanation. It makes good sense to me.
The map is never the territory.....but that doesn't mean a good map is useless.
He gets self-realization too...spiritual enlightenment.........whatever you wanna call it. What he has to say about that rings completely true to me.
On this one skip to 12:30 or so.
If you can hang in, listen to what he says about how some people experience a transcendental (my word, not his) state during sleep.
http://www.youtube.com/v/auKqzbhXZGM&fs=1I got this little epiphany that I'll share...not sure if it will resonate with anybody.
In the Old Testament Bible there is a verse that I remember from my early indoctrination. It's from the book of Joel, one of those prophesies that apocalyptic Christians like to quote, but I think almost everyone completely misunderstands. it....
"Young men will see visions and old men will dream dreams."
When I was young man I saw visions.....aided by psychedelics, which enabled me to hack a mystical experience or two....accidentally, more or less. I don't live my daily life in a transcendental state, but I've carried the memory of those experiences though my entire life, and it is an important part of who I am.
Now I'm an old man.....getting closer anyway.......and on good nights I experience exactly what I think Wilber is talking about.
In order for it to happen....I need to be able to breathe my way into it......falling asleep to me now is (on good nights) a form of breath work. That quiets my mind and helps me let go of the monkey brain. I fall into a special kind of sleep.
It doesn't work so well if I'm high, I don't think. And more than a tiny bit of alcohol makes it impossible.
Anyway.....my dream life has now become very important to me. I can tell when I wake up in the morning by the quality of the dreams I've had.....whether my sleep has done what it should do...which is to heal me from the slow death of a thousand cuts......that my daily life deals out to me.
I believe the kind of work I do is harder for a conscious individual than it is for someone who is not introspective or psychological minded. I deal with other people's bad karma every day...and I need to have a way to keep it from causing me damage. Conscious (lucid) dreaming is capable of doing that.
Cue the alien ships.......