「インテグラル理論の最高の入門書である『万物の歴史』（Brief History of Everything）の新装版です。
この作品は、ケン・ウィルバー（Ken Wilber）が『進化の構造』（Sex, Ecology, Spirituality）の要約版として執筆したものですが、全体が対話形式でまとめられており、初心者にも非常に解りやすい内容となっています。」
The Third Turning occurred with the half brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu, and is generally called the Yogachara school, sometimes referred to as the “Mind-Only” school (which agreed with Nagarjuna that ultimate Reality was Emptiness, but so was ultimate Mind). This teaching became a central foundation of the great Tantra and Vajrayana (Diamond Path) teachings, which particularly flourished in such places as the extraordinary Nalanda University in India from the 8th to the 11th century CE, and continued unabated in Tibetan Buddhist schools—and, indeed, many Buddhists consider Tantra and Vajrayana to be a “Fourth Turning of the Wheel.” (If we do so, which makes sense to me, then what I am actually talking about would be a “Fifth Turning,” so please keep that in mind. But whether we acknowledge these Turnings or not doesn’t affect the main points of this book, which is what a genuinely inclusive, comprehensive spirituality would begin to look like—this is our main issue.) But with regard to the Turnings, those who acknowledged them maintained that each of them tended to “transcend and include” the previous ones, all of them agreeing with many of the Buddha’s original points, and then adding new teachings of their own.
Buddhism is thus used to updating its own major teachings with new and profound additions. But it has been some 1,500 years since the Third Turning; and even the great Tantric schools, which (as noted) flourished from the 8th to the 11th centuries CE, are now close to a thousand years old. The time, again, is more than ripe for a new fundamental addition, a new Turning of the Wheel of Dharma. Many teachers have been saying the same thing for a number of years now; this is one version, a version that has already demonstrated its usefulness and versatility.
One of the leading experts in mind control, Dr. Lifton addressed the issue of doomsday cults such as Aum Shinrikyo.
「Aum and its leader, Shōkō Asahara, were possessed by visions of the end of the world that are probably as old as death itself. Asahara also held in common with many present-day Christian prophets of biblical world-ending events a belief that Armageddon would be connected to those most secular of “end-time” agents, nuclear warheads or chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.
But his cult went a step further. It undertook serious efforts to acquire and produce these weapons as part of a self-assigned project of making Armageddon happen. For the first time in history, end-time religious fanaticism allied itself with weapons capable of destroying the world and a group embarked on the mad project of doing just that. Fortunately, much went wrong. After all, it is not so easy to destroy the world. But we have a lot to learn from the attempt.」」
In 1981, at age twenty-six, during his troubled Tokyo days, he joined Agonshū, one of the most successful of Japan’s “new religions.” Although he was later to disparage Agonshū and even claim that it had been spiritually harmful to him during his three years of membership, there is every evidence that he derived from it many of his subsequent religious principles. Indeed, he found there a powerful guru model, sixty-year-old Seiyū Kiriyama, a highly charismatic figure.
From Kiriyama and Agonshū, Asahara also drew upon a variety of ideas and practices that would become important in Aum: expressions of esoteric Buddhism, mystical forms of yoga, and forms of self-purification aimed at freeing oneself from bad karma. He was also much influenced by Agonshū’s use of American New Age elements from the human-potential movement, individual psychology, and applied neurology. It was here as well that he first encountered the writings of Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century French astrologer and physician who predicted the end of the world with the coming of the year 2000. Asahara, who was to radically alter, supplement, and totalize these influences, soon became a fledgling guru, acquiring a few disciples by the time he left Agonshū.
