Ken Wilber - Integrative or permanent "regression"

I've been reading this blog titled the Edge of Grace by someone who spent a year at Teaching Drum. He wrote some segments on the "Evolution of Consciousness" in which he questions the primitivist thought that says we aren't developing in any way.

Does he have a point? I don't know. I'm thinking a lot about this.

Does it matter? Won't one of the two, if not extinction, just happen? There isn't really a right or a wrong - there is just what WILL happen and what WON'T happen...

One thing I want to point out is the main premise of this and similar writings...that there HAS been a shift in consciousness. It seems to be assumed that there was, but I'm less sure. At the same time, though, where is that line of shift? Is it from tribal living the civilized living? I would doubt that. While I agree there was a sense of oneness with the earth during tribal living, I don't think there's any permanent mental shift from that to our disconnected civilized state we experience today. So where is this shift? Maybe earlier on the scale of evolution - when we weren't considered 'human' - maybe at that point we lived more subconsciously. If that's the case, then this is where this following debate comes from.

Is the civilized mess we see today a tough transition of a subconscious state of living to a fully conscious state of living? Only to be on it's way to some trans-conscious state of living that integrates the two? If that's the case, then civilization isn't the mistake a lot of primitivists would like to believe it is. Most believe that we took a wrong turn and much reconnect/rewild. Or we can say what the following quote is saying...that we must "regress" to fix what our "mistake", as in regress to hunter-gatherer, but instead of stay there, we will then integrate our subconscious and conscious, now fixed, into a new state of being.

I don't know which it could be. A large part of me, still, thinks it doesn't matter - that in the meantime, we still need to reconnect ourselves, no matter which answer it is. We need to stop fucking things up. I think that's all that matters to the generations that live now. Anyways, here it is:

"Whenever evolution produces a new differentiation, and that differentiation is not integrated, a pathology results, and there are two fundamental ways to approach that pathology.

One is exemplified by the Freudian notion … of “regression in service of ego.” That is, the higher structure relaxes its grip on consciousness, regresses to a previous level where the failed integration first occurred, repairs the damage on that level by reliving it in a benign and healing context, and then integrates that level — embraces that level, embraces the former “shadow” — in the new and higher holon of the ego (or total self-system). For the ego’s problem was that during its formative growth, where it should have transcended and included its lower-level drives (such as sex and aggression), it transcended and repressed them, split them off, alienated them — one of the prerogatives of a higher-level structure with its greater relative autonomy, but a prerogative, we have seen, that is bought only and always at the price of pathology. Thus the cure: regression in service of a higher reintegration — a regression that allows evolution to move forward more harmoniously by healing and wholing a previously alienated holon.

The other general approach is the retro-Romantic, which often recommends regression, period. This approach, in my opinion, simply confuses differentiation and dissociation, confuses transcendence and repression. Thus, whenever evolution produces a new differentiation, and that differentiation happens to go into pathological dissociation, then this approach seeks to permanently turn back the pages of emergent history to a time prior to the differentiation. Not prior to the dissociation — we all agree on that! — but prior to the differentiation itself!

That will indeed get rid of the new pathology, at the cost of getting rid of the new depth, the new creativity, the new consciousness. By that retro-Romantic logic, the only way to really get rid of pathology is to get rid of differentiation altogether, which means everything after the Big Bang was a Big Mistake."

Enjoy,
Clayne