And so goes the battle between first-tier levels in these endless culture wars. But this postmodern truth, of course, is maintained to be really real. And then postmodern pluralism comes along and deconstructs both of them, maintaining they are both nothing but social fabrications with no more truth than poetry or fiction. Rational science, on the other hand, finds myth to be just that–a myth–and replaces it with evidence-based truths, which religious myth maintains cannot capture the truly important questions of life (Who am I? What’s the meaning of life? etc.), and it condemns science for that. The mythic fundamentalist view, the basis of most of the world’s exoteric religions, believes its truth is eternal truth–the one and only. The thing about each of these levels of consciousness, which altogether are called “first-tier”, is that each of them believes that its view of the world and its values are the only ones that are true and real. Born with an archaic worldview, each individual develops infantile magic from 1-3 years, mythic-magic from 3-6, mythic from 6-11, rational from 11 onwards, with the possibility of post-rational beginning in late adolescence. And there the world stood, with its five major transformations–which are, in general outline, repeated today in the growth and development of every newborn individual. Until, that is, the 1960’s, which saw the last major world transformation–this time from modern to postmodern, from monolithic reason to postmodern pluralism and the “cultural creatives”.Īnd so there are the major transformations of humankind–archaic to magic to mythic to rational to postmodern, correlative with techno-economic modes going from foraging to horticultural to agrarian to industrial to informational. The rational worldview, along with its scientific materialism, and with its modern values, became in many ways the official worldview of the modern West. The mythic world ruled until right around the Renaissance in the West, where myth began to give way to reason, which exploded during the Enlightenment. Concurrently, the worldview of simple magic gave way mythic-magic–more complex, and more sophisticated.Īround 4,000 B.C.E., the animal-drawn plow was discovered, and horticultural gave way to agrarian, while mythic-magic gave way to fully-developed mythic, with its traditional fundamentalistic values. Simple farming, with a hand-held hoe, called horticulture. Then, around 10,000 years ago, farming was discovered. Around 50,000 years ago, the archaic worldview gave way to a magical worldview, anchored in foraging, hunting, and gathering. In the history of all humanity, there have only been five or six major world transformations: somewhere around 500,000 years ago, humans began to emerge as a distinct species, with an archaic worldview which separated us from the great apes.
Introduction to ‘Your Unique Self – the Radical Path to Personal Enlightenment’ Introduction to ‘Your Unique Self’ – by Ken Wilber
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