THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING

The Theory of Everything

The Theory of Everything

A Theory of Everything should interest two very different groups of readers. For those who have been following his work for years, it represents an expansion into new territory. In this book, Wilber links his explanatory schemata to real-world problems and situations, and in doing so presents a convincing case that only an integral approach to personal and societal development will get humanity through the difficult times ahead. The basic realities that Wilber addresses in his theory building are a primal ground-of-everything reality that he labels Spirit, and the progressive development of mental and physical expressions of Spirit. Wilber has grouped Spirit's manifestations into Interior-Individual I, Exterior-Individual IT, Exterior-Collective ITS, and Interior-Collective WE. As shown in Figure 1, crossed X and Y axes provide the basic framework for presenting this.

Figure 1 — Wilber's Four-Quadrant Structure

The point where the two axes cross, the graph's origin also represents the origin of all development. And progressive development in all quadrants can be pictured as a series of ever-larger concentric circles having the origin as their common center. Wilber often represents different levels of this outward, developmental, evolutionary movement by using diagonal lines with tick marks on them. An example is Figure 3-1, an illustration from this latest book. It relates one aspect of inner development—a gradually-broadening sense of self—to Don Beck and Christopher Cowan's color-coded “memes,” “waves,” or stages, of human development, and relates them to social and cultural development

Figure 3-1.  Some Examples of the Four Quadrants in Humans

No single graphical expression is able to tell the entire story that Wilber wants to tell, but by using multiple graphs of this kind, and tailoring the details to suit the situation, he is able to help us understand a variety of cosmic truths. (For ...