The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence
is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict
with quantum mechanics and with the facts established by
experiment (Radin, 1997:128).Over time, growing experience with the otherness of the world undermines
this pre-personal view, replacing it with a mythic level of awareness. The newly
humbled child's feelings of magical omnipotence are initially transferred to others.
The first such transfer of power is to its parents, who are considered virtually as
powerful as gods. This mythic or operational awareness is typically attained by
children aged from six to eight years (Wilber, 1981:218). As the child matures
further, increasingly concrete operational forms of awareness are replaced by formal
operational thinking - the rationality of adulthood. Normally it has formed in modern
children between the ages of eleven and fifteen years of age. According to Wilber it
is this level of consciousness which is manifested in the typical individuals and
defining institutions of the modern world since the Enlightenment.
At this point Wilber departs from Piaget's clinical work, arguing that we are
on the brink of developing the next stage in consciousness evolution, which he
terms ‘vision-logic’. With the rise of vision-logic, rationality takes yet another step
forward in its internal development, as Wilber says:
The whole point of rationality and its capacity for multiple
perspectives is not simply to abstract the commonalities... but to
put oneself in the shoes of others and thus find a mutual
enrichment and appreciation of differences (Wilber, 1983:28).
Wilber argues that vision logic, is holistic in character, it is able to reintegrate
the dissociations that occurred between the true, the good, and the beautiful in the
modern world. But it does so from a universal perspective rather than a particular
culturally privileged standpoint. Vision logic, according to Wilber, is the final stage of
human awareness before entering into the properly spiritual modes of
consciousness that transcend the personal ego. These trans-egoic levels
themselves consist of a series of stages that Wilber has distilled from accounts by
religious mystics such as Plotinus, the Buddha, Meister Eckhart, St. Theresa,
Nagarjuna, and others. The psychic is the first transpersonal level of awareness. I t
manifests paranormal psychic abilities, spontaneous devotional feelings and
Emersonian nature cosmic consciousness. Next is the subtle level, the seat of
archetypes, Platonic forms, personal deities, and illumination. I t is followed by the
causal level, characterized by unitive consciousness that is the contemplation of the