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The Radiance of Being:


Understanding the Grand Integral Vision;
Living the Integral Life

by Allan Combs
 

Review

In his foreword to the recently released second edition of The Radiance of Being by Allan Combs, Ken Wilber points out that “for the first time in human history we of today have access to virtually all of the world's accumulated information about human consciousness and its potential . . . and it signals the possibility of being able to formulate—also for the first time in history—truly comprehensive or all-inclusive or 'integral' maps and models of human consciousness and its unfolding.” What makes Combs's achievement so remarkable is that in little over three hundred pages he manages to synthesize, and make accessible to the uninitiated reader, the essence of so much of this accumulated information.

Combs tells us that his intent in The Radiance of Being is “to serve as part guide and part fellow traveler on a quest into the labyrinthine realms of science and traditional wisdom in search of the roots of consciousness.” It is precisely this quality of open-ended curiosity that enables him to impart the considerable fruits of his erudition and research with such dexterity and ease. Indeed, if you are compelled, as I was, by the prospect of “understanding the grand integral vision” and have not yet found the time, as I hadn't, to digest the collected works of Hegel, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, and Ken Wilber, let alone the perennial wisdom of the great religious traditions and the latest neurological research into brain dynamics, then following Combs's thread through The Radiance of Being will no doubt prove to be a captivating and educational journey.

A psychologist with a background in chaos theory and the newly emerging sciences of complexity, Combs begins by bringing his knowledge and insight to bear on the mystery of who we are, with a fascinating investigation into the biological and neurological foundations of mind and consciousness. His description of the interwoven systems that have evolved over millennia to form the human brain, combined with his intriguing exploration of the dynamics and patterns that undergird the entire panorama of conscious experience, left me marveling at the complexity, fluidity, and impersonality of what goes on inside our heads. While it is one thing for the Buddha and other great teachers and wisdom traditions to tell us that all our experience is impermanent—that there is no enduring, static entity that can be held onto as “self”—it is quite another to begin to understand empirically how insubstantial are the states of consciousness and patterns of activity that appear to form the “solid ground” of who we think are.

What was even more awe-inspiring, though, was learning what this emerging understanding reveals about both our evolutionary potential and the “grand integral vision” of life as a whole. As Combs says, “We will begin to see ourselves, not as static organisms, but as living processes evolving into the future in a continuous dynamic event of self-creation.” Indeed, the most compelling aspect of the first section of The Radiance of Being is the way in which Combs illuminates how it is the intentionality inherent in consciousness itself that “like a polarizing magnetic field that draws iron filings into formations of multiple ellipses . . . aligns the processes of the mind into patterns with direction and purpose.” He conveys how the domains of science and spirit are converging to release the concept of “evolution” from the hold of the outdated Darwinian model of adaptation in the physical universe. In the context of the deepening integral understanding that he presents, evolution reveals itself to be the movement of the self-organizing and self-creating intelligence inherent in all that is alive.

Having established an overarching context of ever-evolving complexity and creativity as the raison d'être of consciousness itself, Combs explores its unfolding through the minds of some of the leading pathfinders throughout history. Skillfully distilling the essence of Hegel, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser, and Sri Aurobindo, among others, he highlights the pivotal insights that shaped their endeavors to map the mystery of consciousness.

Particularly enlightening is the way in which Combs charts the development of an evolutionary spirituality in the West stretching from Plotinus to the present. We learn, for example, that late-nineteenth-century French philosopher Henri Bergson was the first to elevate evolutionary thinking to the status of a major philosophy that included both the outer dimension of biology and the inner dimension of consciousness. Bergson posited that evolution operates as a pressure that is constantly forcing its way toward higher levels of expression and demonstrates itself through an organism's power of choice.

In one of the most educational chapters, Combs introduces us to the still largely unknown Polish cultural philosopher, Jean Gebser. Gebser's great contribution to the “grand integral vision” was his attempt to conceptualize the dominant patterns of experience that have emerged during human history in his model of five major structures of consciousness—archaic, magic, mythic, mental, and integral. By elucidating how each of these structures is based on a specific perception of time and space, Combs imparts a fascinating experiential snapshot of the evolution of consciousness as we see through the eyes of each worldview.

Combs brings his synthesis of the “grand integral vision” right up to the present with a masterful appraisal of the prodigious, and still-unabated, contribution of contemporary integral philosopher Ken Wilber. In a chapter featuring an amusingly titled section, “The Whole Shebang; states, levels, stages, structures, waves, lines, streams and realms,” Combs gives us Wilber 101, in which he delineates how Wilber has managed to incorporate virtually all major research findings on human development into his multifaceted integral model, the Four Quadrants. The cutting edge of contemporary integral inquiry is further augmented by the inclusion of the author's own recent collaboration with Wilber, entitled the “Wilber-Combs Matrix.” Described by Combs as a “periodic table of consciousness,” it melds the sheaths of traditional Vedanta (physical, pranic, mental, subtle, causal) together with Gebser's five structures of consciousness and the “value memes” of Don Beck's Spiral Dynamics, to represent how different “states” of consciousness are experienced and interpreted according to the developmental structure or “stage” through which they are perceived. And if that makes your head spin, then rest assured, Combs makes it all surprisingly accessible!

It was only toward the end of the book, as the focus shifted to the subject of the second subtitle, “living the integral life,” that I felt Combs's narrative began to lose its fresh and adventurous character. I admired his critique of the popular psychological notion of an unconscious mind, “we shortchange ourselves when we appeal to explanations that lie hidden beyond the creative dynamics of our being” and his description of how integral consciousness emerges through an embrace of complexity resulting in an “enlargement of objectivity.” But Combs's tentative forays into how we might actually begin to harness, and become expressions of, the “grand integral vision” ultimately amount to little more than a summary of various established paths and modes of practice.

Combs finishes his book by sharing his conviction that “each of us must find our own unique integral path. This must be a path that reflects our own needs and aspirations, which will change throughout our lives as our circumstances, opportunities, growth and aspirations also change.” While what he suggests here appears reasonable enough, it does not seem to embolden us to inquire deeply into the implications of what he has so generously presented to us in the preceding chapters. As Combs's thread wove the thrilling multi-dimensional tapestry of the “grand integral vision,” I found myself pulled into a natural contemplation. What might this universal trajectory of evolving consciousness want of myself and all of us at such a critical juncture in our collective journey of Becoming? What would it mean, for example, to seriously consider the implications of the “quantum leap” envisioned by Teilhard de Chardin, which, as Combs tells us, “has its own emergent properties that go far beyond the individual minds”? If we are to sincerely grapple with the implications of “living the integral life,” then surely it means daring to open ourselves up to a potential “radiance of being” that is so positive, all-encompassing, and infused with purpose that it may propel us far beyond the relativistic field of our personal “needs and aspirations.” Indeed, if integral consciousness is to be truly integral, which implies whole, all-encompassing, and unified, then its genuine emergence would have to transcend the status quo of a postmodern culture that only seeks to foster the primacy of the individual's subjective experience.

However, despite this weakness in the overall coherence of The Radiance of Being, Combs's essential offering to us all shines through. What we might otherwise have to spend years gradually assimilating and distilling on our own from a pile of weighty books (in more than one sense of the word!), Combs makes available to us in a medium-sized paperback. So buy it, and as Ken Wilber says in his introduction, take “an exhilarating tour through the grand possibilities of our own being and our own becoming.”

–Pete Bampton



 

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This article is from
Our Morality Issue

 

February–April 2004