Ken Wilber's Singularity?

(excerpt from WIE: Kosmic Questions)

WIE editors asking Ken Wilber about anything. here's something about Ken's version of the “singularity.”

Q: Finally, we’d like to ask you to let your imagination run wild. Please describe, in a stream of consciousness, an unabashedly utopian vision of a truly enlightened future … a world theocracy in which the nondual God becomes the organizing principle. Picture the year 2316 …

KW: Right, but my imagination jams at the beginning on the word “theocracy” because in the past that has meant mythic-theocracy, which is what we don’t want now. Go to Iran if that is what you want. But a truly enlightened future, in my opinion, would be one in which the center of gravity of the culture is at violet or higher, and states of consciousness are navigated at will, which would almost certainly be accompanied by brain/computer interfacing. Virtually all material wants will have been vanquished by nanotech (I’m with Ray Kurzweil on that), and the environmental crisis is long ended. The main concern for such a society is how to help individuals move up the great spiral of development and spectrum of consciousness because all exterior goods and needs have long ago been met. So what’s a poor culture to do?

Interior growth alone will answer that call. And interior growth demands structures and stages, which—unlike states—cannot be induced by drugs, meditation, or brain/mind machines. Addressing this need for interior growth will be the call of tomorrow’s integral culture.

Once that challenge is met, and I believe it will be, the second major problem will be the simple fact that, even in an ultraviolet culture, everybody is still born at square one, at infrared, and must begin their evolution and development from there. Even in today’s society, whose center of gravity is orange/green, everybody is born at square one, which is why we still have pockets of red culture (in street gangs, for example) and amber culture (in all of Kansas, it seems). But those types of problems will not disappear in any conceivable future, so they will need to be addressed creatively.

Then, the extraordinary states and stages available today only to those who work incredibly hard (via meditation, therapy, yoga, etc.) will be commonplace to all. The very Ground of All Being will be as obvious as one’s original face, as vast Emptiness announces both Freedom and Fullness for all souls, an ecstatic release and quiet riot of spiritual radiance drenching each and all, as eternity falls in love with the productions of time all over again, so that looking deep within, one can find only the entire Kosmos, with galaxies swirling where you thought your heart was and supernovas exploding in the middle of what used to be your mind, and spirit itself as simple and obvious as the sound of the rainfall on what is left of the old and forlorn world, long gone in time, never found in space, this simple and ever-present feeling of Being, now and now and endlessly now.

Re: Ken Wilber's Singularity?

Man, that is beautiful. Ken is a true artist once he cuts lose. Thanks for posting this, Mel. I missed it in WIE.

Re: Ken Wilber's Singularity?

exactly! :)