Aaron Hackett Outside Reading 3: evolution

This is the last I will comment about the Ken Wilber book because I haven’t read any more of it and probably won’t be able to until the end of the semester due to my workload. I was thinking about the evolution of consciousness again and remembered a very important thing that Wilber had mentioned much earlier in the book but I didn’t. In the beginning of the book Wilber briefly went over the big bang and the evolution of organism. One of the most interesting things he pointed out was that evolution was never by accident. This is illustrated beautifully through the leg to the wing. Although it was not done in a short amount of time, there must have been a series of simultaneous evolutions occurring or a jump. A half leg half wing will never be able to function fully as either a leg or a wing. As I pondered on this I thought about ostriches. They cannot fly, but have wings and are still alive. This seems to contradict what Wilber says because it proves that there can be nonfunctioning wings due to the simple fact that the animal can use their functioning legs to get around. Although I can say this to prove him wrong, this was not the entire point he was trying to make. When applying this concept to depth and consciousness I believe he was trying to say that the levels are wholly different from each other and cannot be simply stumbled upon.