Ken Wilber argues Western education ignores the perennial philosophy, which distinguishes between the relative world of form and absolute, formless truth. He was enraged to reach 20 without learning this, and later helped Harvard psychiatry trainees study the 18 stages of Mahamudra meditation to distinguish mystical experiences from schizophrenia.
Questions this video answers
Transformations of Consciousness.
18 stages.
The first 20 years of his life.
Chapters
When I first learned about what was at the time called the perennial philosophy, which simply meant that this notion of two truths and a relative truth and a relative world of form and an absolute truth unmanifest formlessness. And that one was fine for sort of everyday conventional living. And one was a way of waking up, literally waking up to your true self, an absolute, infinite, eternal, true self. And when I first found out about that, the existence around the world universally of this some version of that belief structure, except what we got in Western education on the one hand, you would think, you know, it'd be kind of a joy because it's like, oh, wow, I finally found out something that's incredibly important. And my reaction instead was I was enraged that I had to go all the way through the first 20 years of my life and nobody told me about this. And it's like, what, what were you people doing? You call this education? And I really was just fuming. I hardly knew what to do with myself. How could an educational system let that go? How could it just miss arguably the single most important kind of truth in existence and call it self education? I mean, you didn't even get this stuff in history classes. So horrifying. And my. I've always seen part of what I wanted to do was by knowing as much as I could about these individual human disciplines, anthropology, archaeology, psychiatry, law, history and so on, and using quotes from them and putting together arguments that would make it more understandable and believable that there were at least these two modes of knowing these two ways of seeing the world. And when I. I like to think that, you know, I had a small impact on some of this when I first started writing. If you had an experience of cosmic consciousness, of feeling one with the entire universe in a moment to moment fashion, in radiant union with the ground of all being. And you told that to a psychiatrist, you could be locked up, you literally could be committed, because that was schizophrenic, that was absolutely, you know, insane. And then from that to about 15 years later, I did a book called Transformations of Consciousness. And I wanted five co authors and all five are from Harvard. And all five were as mainstream, as modern as this is it as you could get. And they were all pointing out the importance of these modes of knowing, the way that you find them in all cultures. And with the event of that book, every psychiatrist in training at Harvard had to learn the 18 stages of Mahamudra meditation and distinguish it from schizophrenia. So it's sort of like a, you know, a minor victory that Ah, we finally got this into an academic setting to some degree. Thing is. Well, awful long way to go.
