The Reflexive Atman

I wish to write some words concerning two books that I’m in the process of reading: ‘The Reflexive Universe” by Arthur M. Young and “The Atman Project’ by Ken Wilber.

Young’s book considers the manifested universe as a reflexive process of light manifesting into the material and then ascending back to light. It is a seven stage process, each stage incorporating seven stages.

Each stage itself is one of four states of freedom, each stage on the descent becoming less free, and each stage on the ascent becoming more free, the fourth (no freedom) stage, the molecular, containing the all-important turn.

Light is Consciousness. It is timeless and not of the manifested world. Therefore it is nondual. Our mind, though, sees a material universe. In that vein, and understanding that duality is an illusion created by the mind, the entire process still can be seen as one great metaphor for consciousness knowing itself.

Wilber’s book can be viewed as the process of consciousness waking in the human being. It too is reflexive, in that there is an outward arc and an inward arc. Wilber incorporates the insight of psychology with that of the wisdom traditions in tracing the human being from birth to self-realization.

Before I begin, I’d like to place some caveats here. Although Young’s book is brilliant, it is not transcendent, in that Young’s analysis of the seventh and final stage, that of the human being, or what he refers to as the monad, appears to me to be limited by his own limited realization.

This is where Wilber’s book comes in: as a substitute for Young’s seventh stage. But one caveat here as well. I’ve never been a big fan of Wilber; he appears too cerebral in instances. But this book is, to this point, although dense sometimes, and sometimes overly technical, eminently understandable, and possibly transformational, but definitely emblematic.