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Streams of Wisdom: An Advanced Guide to Integral Spiritual Development
Streams of Wisdom serves as an advanced guide to spiritual development. Whether you stand in a specific religious tradition, consider yourself "spiritual but not religious", or are merely an observer of the current religious and spiritual landscape, the content in this book will equip you with an intelligent and intellectually rigorous orientation to spiritual transformation. Have you ever wanted to know the difference between a temporary state experience and an on going experience of spiritual awakening? Did you know that there are very real differences between the process of spiritual awakening and one's capacity for spiritual intelligence? With Integral Theory as a platform, Streams of Wisdom employs crystal clear discrimination to distinguish three core vectors of spiritual development. Using concrete examples from our world's great religious traditions to highlight each dimension of growth, DiPerna builds the case that the deepest aspects of spiritual transformation are universal across traditions. This means that even if the surface features of spiritual development tend to vary from one tradition to the next, the underlying reality and path of development is consistent and invariant. With access to all the wisdom streams of Earth, we now know, through comparative analysis, that similar spiritual potentials are available to one and all. Streams of Wisdom will help you make sense of your own spiritual experiences. It will help you better understand where you are on the spiritual path and what to expect next. There are wondrous possibilities awaiting discovery. Streams of Wisdom points to a future of positivity for us all. This book serves as volume 1 of a series titled Integral Religion and Spirituality. The series is designed to help catalyze the emergence of a trans-lineage world spirituality.
270 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 1, 2014
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134 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 12, 2025
wow... amazing amazing book. some meditation experience very beneficial before reading
September 29, 2025
I went to a mediation workshop run by Dustin, which I found a fantastic and transformative experience. Believe me when I say that I like him as a person and teacher, and so my review of this book is entirely objective.
Streams of Wisdom makes a case for contemporary spirituality, drawing from the integral frameworks of Ken Wilbur and the scholarly work of Harvard professor Daniel P Brown. I've discussed Wilbur's theories in other reviews, and my assessment that it an an abuse of charts with little rigor remain unchanged. Brown is a more interesting scholar. In his long career he conducted conventional research on attachment and trauma in psychology, as well as learning Mahamudra meditation from Tibetan lamas and translating ancient Sanskrit texts into English. Both a clinical psychologist and devout Buddhist, he combined his two passions with academic research on meditation and Eastern mystical traditions.
Brown's key point was that contrary to the conventional wisdom that there are many paths to a single supreme divine truth, he found major similarities in how different mystical traditions approach person spiritual growth, diverging in their final results. I'd call this a novel approach to spiritual development.
Conversely, Wilbur's integral theory is a mush of hierarchies along various axes of poorly defined terms. I can see how waking lives are spent in a "gross" material realm, and dreams access a "subtle" realm, but the "causal" and "non-dual" realms beyond are referred to repeatedly without being defined. The Wilburian point is that we as heirs of the Enlightenment rationality discard pre-modern magical and mythical stages of spiritual development, and that there are post-modern and integral stages beyond. Either you believe this, or you don't. But Streams of Wisdom did not do a great job of convincing me.
There was a singular moment where a quote struck me so hard that I had to put down the book in shock at the opacity of the writing.
It is not better in context. My brother in Buddha, I've got a PhD in post-Foucauldian social sciences. I am fully comfortable with heavy jargon and complex ideas. I can't make heads or tails of this.
Sadly, there are hints of something interesting here, with nods towards the neural correlates of awareness, that "ineffable" mystical states that cannot be described in English do have accurate terminology from Buddhist and Hindu traditions, and that a group of people meditating can share a collective awareness. But these nuggets could be better delivered in a 1200 word blog post. I'm mostly further convinced that Wilbur's integral theory is a bad acid trip, and that White people should be very cautious about innovations in spiritual matters.
Streams of Wisdom makes a case for contemporary spirituality, drawing from the integral frameworks of Ken Wilbur and the scholarly work of Harvard professor Daniel P Brown. I've discussed Wilbur's theories in other reviews, and my assessment that it an an abuse of charts with little rigor remain unchanged. Brown is a more interesting scholar. In his long career he conducted conventional research on attachment and trauma in psychology, as well as learning Mahamudra meditation from Tibetan lamas and translating ancient Sanskrit texts into English. Both a clinical psychologist and devout Buddhist, he combined his two passions with academic research on meditation and Eastern mystical traditions.
Brown's key point was that contrary to the conventional wisdom that there are many paths to a single supreme divine truth, he found major similarities in how different mystical traditions approach person spiritual growth, diverging in their final results. I'd call this a novel approach to spiritual development.
Conversely, Wilbur's integral theory is a mush of hierarchies along various axes of poorly defined terms. I can see how waking lives are spent in a "gross" material realm, and dreams access a "subtle" realm, but the "causal" and "non-dual" realms beyond are referred to repeatedly without being defined. The Wilburian point is that we as heirs of the Enlightenment rationality discard pre-modern magical and mythical stages of spiritual development, and that there are post-modern and integral stages beyond. Either you believe this, or you don't. But Streams of Wisdom did not do a great job of convincing me.
There was a singular moment where a quote struck me so hard that I had to put down the book in shock at the opacity of the writing.
Offering one further example to illustrate the last point listed above will help ground the concepts in actual experience. From the perspective of a non-dual/trans-dual vantage point the apparent subjective and apparent objective aspects of awareness are non-different. As such, the idea of a change in state according to the subject-object co-creation doesn't exactly make sense. From this trans-dual vantage point everything is the "same taste" of awareness.
It is not better in context. My brother in Buddha, I've got a PhD in post-Foucauldian social sciences. I am fully comfortable with heavy jargon and complex ideas. I can't make heads or tails of this.
Sadly, there are hints of something interesting here, with nods towards the neural correlates of awareness, that "ineffable" mystical states that cannot be described in English do have accurate terminology from Buddhist and Hindu traditions, and that a group of people meditating can share a collective awareness. But these nuggets could be better delivered in a 1200 word blog post. I'm mostly further convinced that Wilbur's integral theory is a bad acid trip, and that White people should be very cautious about innovations in spiritual matters.
March 4, 2022
I didn't know what to expect when I purchased this book, I guess I saw the blurb
"An advanced guide to integral spiritual development"
and thought to myself, "Hey, I want to develop my spirituality, I'm a little unsure about what the best ways to expend my energy are in cultivating this goal, having a roadmap could really help me take the guesswork out of the process."
While the book did provide me with some guidance in this respect, what I actually discovered inside was something I didn't even know I needed until I had it, a meta conceptual framework for understanding what it means to develop spiritually, transcendent of the dogmatism inherent in traditionalism, the narrow sightedness of modernism and the quagmire of postmodernity all while including the insights gained from these levels of analysis in what is called the integral level of spiritual intelligence.
Spirituality is such a broad term that it encompasses literally everything, which makes it a topic that is very difficult to organise into overarching conceptual frameworks. It also doesn't help that everyone's experience of spirituality is largely subjective and open to radically different interpretations and despite this I believe in this work, building off of the seminal insights of Ken Wilber and Daniel P. Brown, Dustin DiPerna has succeeded in laying solid foundations for a universal map of spiritual development.
I really appreciated the grounded insight this book contains, it is self-critical, logical and understands its limitations all the while providing a translineage framework for understanding the different planes and levels of spiritual development, laying the foundation for the Great Human Tradition to flourish and to pull us out of the current spiritual dark age into a new epoch in which spirituality is cast out from the shadow of its traditional roots and taken seriously as an important aspect of personal and collective growth.
As a marker of how valuable I found the wisdom in this book (which I didn't even begin to touch on in this review), I ordered the other two books in the trilogy before I had even finished this one and am eagerly awaiting their arrival.
"An advanced guide to integral spiritual development"
and thought to myself, "Hey, I want to develop my spirituality, I'm a little unsure about what the best ways to expend my energy are in cultivating this goal, having a roadmap could really help me take the guesswork out of the process."
While the book did provide me with some guidance in this respect, what I actually discovered inside was something I didn't even know I needed until I had it, a meta conceptual framework for understanding what it means to develop spiritually, transcendent of the dogmatism inherent in traditionalism, the narrow sightedness of modernism and the quagmire of postmodernity all while including the insights gained from these levels of analysis in what is called the integral level of spiritual intelligence.
Spirituality is such a broad term that it encompasses literally everything, which makes it a topic that is very difficult to organise into overarching conceptual frameworks. It also doesn't help that everyone's experience of spirituality is largely subjective and open to radically different interpretations and despite this I believe in this work, building off of the seminal insights of Ken Wilber and Daniel P. Brown, Dustin DiPerna has succeeded in laying solid foundations for a universal map of spiritual development.
I really appreciated the grounded insight this book contains, it is self-critical, logical and understands its limitations all the while providing a translineage framework for understanding the different planes and levels of spiritual development, laying the foundation for the Great Human Tradition to flourish and to pull us out of the current spiritual dark age into a new epoch in which spirituality is cast out from the shadow of its traditional roots and taken seriously as an important aspect of personal and collective growth.
As a marker of how valuable I found the wisdom in this book (which I didn't even begin to touch on in this review), I ordered the other two books in the trilogy before I had even finished this one and am eagerly awaiting their arrival.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews