Book Review: The Essential Ken Wilbur: An Introductory Reader, Ken Wilbur

This book is a compilation of excerpts from various Ken Wilbur books written, apparently, prior to 1998 by the woman who edited many (all?) of them. I say this because The Marriage of Sense and Soul was written in 1998 and there are no excerpts from it. However, the more I read the more I noticed that it didn't really matter much that some books weren't included because Wilbur is basically saying the same thing over and over again in his books. Now, don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of The Marriage of Sense and Soul and I thought it was a fantastic read. But since it was my first experience with Wilbur, I didn't realize how unoriginal that books was in his repertoire.

Anyway, the books was fine and it even got me to do some thinking about many things. And this is the point, isn't it? The middle section talks about his theories of hierarchies and holons. It's like the mathematics in Physics; it takes the fun out of it completely. But that's not to say there's nothing good in there.

One thing that was in this book that was missing from the other one that I read is his cheesy endings to chapters. Now, I don't know how much of this was the compiler's doing and how much of it was his, but you'll get some really deep thoughts with a concluding paragraph about how if manage to understand these things, then the skies will open up to you and the seas will roll in your heart and the clouds of your mind will lift like a gentle fog on a crisp morning in the foothills of the Tibetan rain forest. Okay, so I made all of that crap up, but that's the kind of mood-killing fodder with which he'd end some very fine ideas.

One last negative note before I finish: There was a very short section on Academic Religion. It was only a paragraph, really. Since I intend to go into Academic Religion, I was very interested in this section. I'll sum it up for you. In the first paragraph he talks about how, when he was a child, he'd put bugs in a "killing jar", which is a jar with a lid into which you'd drop a lethal fluid on cotton balls and insects so you could mount and display the insects. The last paragraph, which I will quote in its entirety was "Academic religion is the killing jar of spirit". I feel that Wilbur is elevating Spirituality over the social and anthropological aspects of Religion. Religion is both social and spiritual. To claim that one is inherently better than the other is... well, let's just say it... elitist.

OK, so I said only one more note, but here's another while we're on the topic of elitism. Ken Wilbur is an elitist. There's no two ways about it. He likes to make hierarchies because that allows him to place himself at one end and everyone else at the other. He likes to structure ideas in lists and orders because, if you know the lists and orders, then you obviously are clairvoyant enough to understand why they are this way. It's annoying, Ken.

Finally (yes, it really is final this time), I want to say that Ken Wilbur's books are pretty good. I wouldn't recommend that you read them all, but I would recommend that you read at least one. I liked Science and Religion: The Marriage of Sense and Soul and after reading The Essential Ken Wilbur I have a feeling I would have liked One Taste, or Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality, or any number of others. Not because they have something new to offer, but because they are effectively the same books! Or at the very least the same ideas laid out differently.

So, go buy yourself a Ken Wilbur book. Read it. Enjoy it. Learn from it. Then, it's "move along folks, there's nothing more to see here".