Sex, Ecology, Spirituality - Definition and Overview

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution is philosopher Ken Wilber's magnum opus. Published in 1995, it is the work in which he attacks modern philosophical naturalism, attempting to show its insufficiency as a explanation of being, evolution, and the meaning of life. Wilber also finds the global ecological crisis to be a result of what he calls modernity's "flatland" approach to being. Major ideas that Wilber employs include:

• Erich Jantsch's account of co-evolution and self-organizing systems
• Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory
• Arthur Koestler's account of holism and holarchy
• Arthur Lovejoy's account of the Great Chain of Being
• Aurobindo Ghosh's account of the evolution of being and integral consciousness
• Jean Gebser's account of the development of human consciousness
• Jean Piaget's theory of developmental psychology
• The Neo-Platonist Plotinus' nondual ontology
• Schelling's existential idealism
• the Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson's account of nature mysticism
• the Christian mystic Saint Teresa of Avila's account of deity mysticism
• Meister Eckhart's account of causal mysticism, and
• the Hindu guru Ramana Maharshi's account of nondual mysticism

The book is divided into the following sections:

1. The Web of Life
2. The Pattern That Connects
3. Individual And Social
4. A View From Within
5. The Emergence Of Human Nature
6. Magic, Mythic And Beyond
7. The Farther Reaches Of Human Nature
8. The Depths Of The Divine
9. The Way Up Is The Way Down
10. This-Wordly, Otherwordly
11. Brave New World
12. The Collapse Of The Kosmos
13. The Dominance Of The Descenders
14. The Unpacking Of God

The German edition of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality was entitled: Eros, Kosmos, Logos—Eine Jahrtausend-Vision ("A Millenium-vision").

Wilber intended for SES (as it is sometimes referred to) to be the first volume in a series called The Kosmos Trilogy, but the second volume has not yet appeared.

Quotation

"Put differently, I sought a world philosophy. I sought an integral philosophy, one that would believably weave together the many pluralistic contexts of science, morals, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world's great wisdom traditions. Not on the level of details—that is finitely impossible; but on the level of orienting generalizations: a way to suggest that the world is one, undivided whole, and related to itself in every way: a holistic philosophy for a holistic Kosmos: a world philosophy, an integral philosophy." —Ken Wilber, "Introduction to Volume Six of the Collected Works"