PETER WILBERG

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Peter Wilberg - A Brief Biography

Peter Wilberg is a British-born philosopher and psychologist belonging to the ‘Second Generation’ of refugees from Nazi Germany. His father was an German political refugee and activist in the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany and his mother a Jewish refugee.

The phrase that best sums up Peter’s life, even as a young boy, is “in this world but not of this world”. His focus in life was always inward, but rather than this being limiting, Peter realised that it was the inner world that was a vast and infinite arena waiting to be explored, demystified and written about. Already in his teens, he was able to psychically shape-shift his inner body, whether in resonance with a piece of music or a person on the street.

Inspired by Marx, it became his life’s goal to unite his cultural roots, psychical capacities and political radicalism within a philosophical and scientific framework that could stand against our society’s soul-less understanding of the human being, the human body and human social relations. Peter first read the Communist Manifesto at the age of fifteen. This led him into active membership of several British communist organisations. He experienced the grass roots democracy and spiritual euphoria of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution through a four-week stay in China in 1971. He was a member of the British and Irish Communist Organisation.

He studied psychology, politics and philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford researching Hegelian, Marxist, Daoist and Buddhist ‘dialectical’ thinking. He led political protests against the ideologies of genetic reductionism and behaviourism at the psychology faculty of Oxford University, long before the advent of genetic medicine and the current fashion for ‘cognitive-behavioural’ therapies.

The chance discovery of an article in Telos magazine led him in 1975 to New York to meet its author, Michael Kosok, then a professor of mathematics and physics at Fairleigh Dickinson University, New Jersey, and one whose work was also influenced by the profound insights contained in SETH books ‘channelled’ by Jane Roberts. Michael Kosok’s formalisation of Hegel’s dialectical logic had generated a unified dialectical field theory of the sciences that, though still unrecognised, both anticipated and went far beyond the work of ‘big-name’ physicists such as Bohm and Capra.

Influenced by the Seth books and Michael Kosok’s work, Peter Wilberg returned to England to take up an MA Programme in Humanistic Psychology, studying phenomenological psychotherapy under Steven Gans (a colleague of RD Laing) and linking Laing’s anti-psychiatry with his own critical analysis of the market-economic notion of personal and cultural identity as private property. He based his MA thesis on experiential group research into ‘lucid dreaming’ – using the “Aspect Psychology” of Jane Robert’s to explore the deeper nature of dreaming as the expression of direct inner connections between aspects of Self and Other.

During the years that followed his dream research, Peter Wilberg engaged in ongoing theoretical and experiential research into the nature of ‘inner sound’ and the ‘inner voice’’, cultivating a particular psychic ability which he called ‘inner voice communication’. Along with the thinking of Martin Heidegger, this formed the basis of his many essays and articles on listening, understood as an active form of silent inner communication. ‘Inner voice communication’ was also one of the first names he gave to the unique form of pair meditation that lies at the heart of his ‘New Yoga’ of the inner body - a yoga aimed not just at meditating or ‘realising’ our own inner self but at cultivating the ability to directly sense and ‘resonate’ with the inner selves of others.

Peter’s own German-Jewish cultural heritage had long drawn him not only to Marx but also to the writings of the Jewish religious and social philosopher Martin Buber, whose ethics of authentic dialogue, made famous by the book “I and Thou”, identified the deeper sources of cultural creativity and social transformation in the sphere of “the interhuman” – the intimate sphere of immediate one-to-one relations between human beings. In his book, “Deep Socialism”, Peter has sought to integrate Buber’s dialogical ethics with Marx’s ‘dialectical’ thinking. His purpose was to lay the basis for a new form of deeply relational socialism. This is a “Deep Socialism” geared towards individual ‘value fulfilment’. This is the fulfilment of those deep spiritual values linking human beings in relationship - values that the market merely exploits as a source of economic value or reduces to superficial ‘brand values’ attached to material commodities.

Peter Wilberg’s ‘insider knowledge’ of the language and values of the corporate world arose from a 14-year career as a business language trainer and teacher trainer, during which he developed a new model of language and of language training methodology. His in-depth experience of the nature of the one-to-one teaching relationship – one which he published the first-ever book - and his great interest in its many psychological levels and dimensions, has been carried forward in the individual mentoring, training and supervision that he now provides as a spiritual teacher and therapist. Right throughout and after his professional career, Peter has devoted himself to intensive spiritual research and writing, guided not only by the Marx and Buber, the Seth books and Michael Kosok but also by the profound thinking of Martin Heidegger and the work of Eugene Gendlin. Peter’s books deal in a deep inter-disciplinary way with broad range of interrelated topics, approaching them from angles derived from all the sources and resources, inner and outer, from which he has drawn.

1. Deep Socialism – Peter Wilberg’s new ‘manifesto’ of Marxist ethics and economics, applying Marx’s analysis of economic values to the understanding of ethical values, showing the ruthless exploitation of all deep values in the global market economy, and their transformation into empty and purely symbolic values - ‘McValues’ - under the aegis of U.S. cultural imperialism.

2. Head, Heart and Hara – In this book Peter introduces and develops the concept of a ‘soul body’, understanding it not as an energy body with energy centres but as an awareness body with centres of awareness – head, heart and abdomen or ‘hara’. These need to be felt and united in order to not only connect with our own deeper self but to experience a deeper sense of inner connectedness to others.

3. The Therapist as Listener This is a collection of essays all dealing with the deeper nature, psychology and therapeutic value of listening - a subject that Peter found to be almost totally neglected in books on psychotherapy - and found almost no place training programmes for counsellors and psychotherapists.

4. From Psychosomatics to ‘Soma-Semiotics’ This book takes up Eugene Gendlin’s concept of meaning as ‘felt sense’, extending it to present a new understanding of the inwardly felt self, inwardly felt body and inwardly felt ‘dis-ease’ of the individual - a subject totally ignored in the theory and practice of both conventional and alternative medicine.

5. Heidegger, Medicine and Scientific Method Here Peter Wilberg sets out and extends Martin Heidegger’s penetrating critique of what is considered to be ‘scientific method’, particularly as applied in biological and genetic medicine. He points out that the latter had its roots in the medical model of social ‘disease’ that formed the basis of Nazi ideology and resulted in the mass murder of mental patients as well as Jews and all other foreign bodies considered to threaten the 'health' of the social body.

6. The Inner Universe – Here Peter Wilberg criticises what he sees as the fundamentalist dogmas of modern science and introduces instead a radically new concept of what constitutes a truly 'fundamental' science - a unified field theory of awareness with relevance to both the human and natural sciences, as well as to Rudolf Steiner’s concept of ‘spiritual science’.

7. The Qualia Revolution This is a radical critique of fashionable quantum-physical accounts of consciousness. In their place it offers a revolutionary new philosophy of science based on the concept of ‘qualia’ rather than quanta, qualia being basic units of awareness with their own sensual qualities rather than basic units of ‘energy’ definable only as abstract mathematical quantities.

8. From New Age to New Gnosis This book explores the nature of gnostic spirituality, its historical roots and its contemporary relevance as a radical alternative to both traditional religion, modern science and 'New Age' pseudo-science and pseudo-spirituality.

9. The New Yoga – Tantra Reborn
Approaching anew one of the richest and yet least explored spiritual traditions, that of the Kashmiri Shaivist tantras, Peter Wilberg lays out the foundations of a new ‘tantric’ yoga of the inner body – doing so with the same degree of philosophical and spiritual-scientific originality as its greatest historic exponent and practitioner – Abhinavagupta.

Peter Wilberg lives in the small town of Whitstable on the North coast of Kent in South-East England, together with his partner and collaborator Karin Heinitz. Karin is a body-oriented ‘Biodynamic’ psychotherapist who applies the New Yoga in her work as a new and effective form of ‘Inner Bodywork’. = His sister, Sonja Linden, is both a playwright, and writer in residence at the Medical Institute for the Victims of Torture in London.

ABOUT ME – NOTES AND QUOTES


We come from within, not above.

Jane Roberts

How is it still possible to preserve a Tradition which
Might have to survive underground for a long time?

Martin Heidegger

Born in England of mixed Aryan-German and German-Jewish origins, I have always felt a profound sense of alienation from the beliefs systems and cultures of both orthodox Judaism and Anglicised or Romanised Christianity. Instead I found my first ‘religion’ in the writings of Karl Marx. Like Freud and Einstein, he was German of Jewish ancestry, one whose revolutionary thinking expressed the spiritual values of what Isaac Deutscher would later call the ‘non-Jewish Jew’ - the prototype of whom was none other than Christ himself. But forget ‘Jews for Jesus’. For the ‘Christ’ I speak of here is the Christ of the gnostics, the incarnation of an iconoclastic spiritual tradition of inner knowing or gnosis that preceded the birth of the historic Jesus, and will survive the collapse of all the institutionalised Judaeo-Christian religions, including Islam. This tradition was above all kept alive in the anti-Roman, anti-enlightenment and anti-materialistic spirit of German mystical theology, music and romantic art. It was the deep values of this Theologia Deutsch and the subversive underground tradition it guarded and preserved that I have always felt the most intense kinship with. In first centuries after Christ this spiritual tradition traced itself back to Seth, the third son of Adam and Eve – “beyond good and evil” – and to his source and namesake, a spiritual entity or ‘aeon’ called Seth. Like the Eastern Tantric spiritual traditions in which it found its first and most joyful historic expression, this tradition acknowledged the feminine aspect of the divine, not under the name of Shakti but of Sophia – a name which means ‘wisdom’ and from which the word philosophia (‘loving wisdom’) is derived. As a gnostic ‘philosopher’ I sense a deep inner connection between the so-called ‘Sethian’ stream of ancient ‘gnosticism’ and its contemporary equivalent - the SETH books of Jane Roberts and their no less subversive spiritual message or ‘gospel’. Both offer a wisdom of inwardness and depth - the central values too, of the Teutonic gnostic tradition - one in which the divine is felt as “within, not above.”

However vast outer space may be, yet with all its sidereal distances it hardly bears comparison with the dimensions, with the depth dimension of our inner being, which does not even need the spaciousness of the universe to be within itself almost unfathomable…To me it seems more and more as though our customary consciousness lives on the tip of a pyramid whose base within us (and in a certain way beneath us) widens out so fully that the farther we find ourselves able to descend into it, the more generally we appear to be merged into those things that, independent of time and space, are given in our earthly, in the widest sense, worldly existence.

Rainer Maria Rilke

In my view the teachings of the SETH transmitted by Jane Roberts are truly the most powerful ‘Gnostic Gospels’ of our times. At the same time they are the potential source of a revolutionary new philosophy of science and religion, physics and psychology, medicine and mystical experience. I see myself as a pioneer of this new philosophy – one already anticipated by such great theologians and thinkers, poets and painters as Meister Eckhart, Friedrich Scheirmacher, Caspar David Friedrich, Rainer Maria Rilke, Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Klages, Karl Marx, Martin Buber, Ludwig Klages, Martin Heidegger and Rudolf Steiner. I see my task as one of guarding the wisdom-tradition or gnosis of these great Germanic and German-Jewish teachers, in order to forge the philosophical foundations of the ‘New Gnosis’ - one firmly grounded not only in the depths of my own inner knowing but in the inner truth of the new SETHIAN gospels that Jane Roberts has bequeathed us. The avatars of The New Gnosis in this age of the Kali Yuga are not the ‘New Age’ sort, but rather those whom Heidegger described in the late 1930’s as ‘The Ones to Come’:

mace bearers of the truth of Being, in which a being is uplifted to the simple mastery that prevails in every thing and every breath. They reside in masterful knowing, as what is truthful knowing. Whoever attains this knowing awareness does not let himself be computed or coerced…Today there are already a few of those who are to come. Their intimating and seeking is hardly recognisable to them themselves…[They] count among themselves the essentially unpretentious ones, to whom no publicness belongs, but who in their inner beauty gather the shining ahead of the last god and then gift it to the few and the rare by radiating it back to them.

Martin Heidegger