Tim Z. Brooks On Nonduality: Presence, Practice, Paradox

Finding Radical Wholeness, Oneness, or All-That-Is

By Tim Z. Brooks
December 8, 2024
4 Min read
988 comments

In the “Introduction” to Finding Radical Wholeness (FRW), the philosopher Ken Wilber articulates a philosophy of life that he describes as a fundamental orientation to Wholeness in five different modes, as those modes are defined by a spiritual movement called Integral Metatheory. While this philosophy may be new to many of his readers, it is one way of practicing a popular life philosophy commonly called “spiritual, but not religious (SBNR).”

But don’t let this description fool you into thinking his book is about the sort of new age woo-woo or pop-psychology or narcissistic egoism that often goes by the name of SBNR. Instead, Integral Metatheory is about going beyond these sorts of approaches to spirituality by entering into a cognitively complex worldview and disciplined contemplative practice to which all are called but which few actually embody.

What sort of spirituality is Ken Wilber trying to overcome with this sort of Integral Spirituality? He writes:

Its approach is spiritual, in the sense that it helps you to directly discover a real Wholeness–a genuine spirituality–right here and right now in your own life, but it does not demand any sort of belief in magical and mythic stories, miracle events, or anything like an institutional religion. In redefining a genuine spirituality as the discovery of a real Wholeness, it bypasses most of the magical and mythic belief systems that permeate so many of the world’s religions–and in exactly that sense, it is “spiritual, but not religious.”

Genuine spirituality, Wilber claims in FRW, can be found by practices which follow his “pointing-out instructions” for five specific types of Wholeness:

  • Waking Up
  • Growing Up
  • Opening Up
  • Cleaning Up
  • Showing Up

If you are familiar with Integral Spirituality, you will immediately recognize these types of Wholeness as injunctions (that is, a voluntarily chosen command to do a specific action) which disclose aspects of reality which aren’t obvious and which can’t be found without practicing the injunction. Waking up requires contemplative practice, growing up requires study of psychological and spiritual stages of evolution and reflecting upon their significance to one’s own developmental path, cleaning up requires shadow work, and so on.

I’ll be having more to say about this philosophy of life as we read FRW together over the next few weeks. For now, I simply want to encourage you to acquire the book if you are not already familiar with Integral Spirituality, and to begin to think about this philosophy can give you a wider and more complete picture of how you are living your life, how you are conceiving the world, and what is missing from your philosophy at this time.

I don’t intend to use the term “spirituality”, however, or even SBNR. It really isn’t necessary, in my opinion, and can get in the way of genuine understanding. Instead, I’d like to reflect on the ways that Wholeness is a useful concept for pointing out many worthwhile parts of an interesting philosophy of life, one that has proven useful to me in the past and which remains a valuable touchstone for my own development.

When I think of Wholeness, the first things to come to mind are the Dao (Tao), Yin-Yang, and Spirit (in the philosophical sense, like in German idealism), Holon (Integral Metatheory), and terms like All-That-Is and Oneness and Holy Spirit (as in Christian panentheism). Some of these obviously are religious, and I include them not to proselytize any specific religion like Christianity or Taoism, but because they are personally meaningful to me given the unique history of my own life’s influences.

(I wish to emphasize the qualifier “personally meaningful to me” because that’s what this blog is all about: my personal transformative process in its unique manifestations, which won’t be entirely relevant to you, but which should be partially relevant to you insofar as I (get lucky and happen to) articulate universal truths about human nature and divine reality.)

What terms do you find useful to you for pointing to these dimensions of reality that go beyond any one specific thing and pointing us elusively towards being part of something far greater than ourselves as we usually think of ourselves?

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Tim Z. Brooks

"Tim Z. Brooks" is the pen name for the anonymous author of Nondual Recovery.

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By Tim Z. Brooks December 8, 2024
988 comments
Tim Z. Brooks On Nonduality: Presence, Practice, Paradox

Tim Z. Brooks is a site with blog posts and drafts of several books-in-progress on the topics of spirituality, integrative metatheory, and Sacred Words. You can also subscribe to Tim's newsletter and follow him on Facebook to read daily notes on his Integral Life Practice.