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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 a German political refugee and activist in the anti-Nazi resistance in Germany and his mother a Jewish refugee.

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. This is a yoga aimed not just at meditating or ‘realising’ our own inner self but at cultivating the ability to ‘meditate the other’ to directly sense and ‘resonate’ with the inner selves and inner bodies of others. Central to The New Yoga and The New Therapy is a new understanding of the inner body as our inwardly sensed or subjective body. Distinguishing the objective or physical body (German Körper) and the subjectively felt or lived body of the human being (German Leib) is central to the new understanding of both somatic and psychological dis-ease seeded by Heidegger’s Zollikon seminars and brought to full expression in both the writing and therapeutic work of Peter Wilberg.

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. 

For many years he has given complementary training and supervision in The New Therapy and The New Yoga to trainee and practicing psychotherapists, counsellors, social workers and health practitioners. He has also developed new approaches to psychopharmacology and a new form of organisational health consultancy linking the health of the individual with the health of human relations in the workplace - The New Workplace Counselling.

Throughout his life, 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, (available as published or forthcoming titles from www.newgnosis.co.uk  ) 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. (not yet published)

 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’.  (not yet published)

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. 

10. Tantric Wisdom for Today's World

11. The Awareness Principle - a radical new philosophy of life, science and religion
 
The books are available from www.amazon.co.uk and www.amazon.com.

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.

A ring of sites dedicated to the work and thinking of Peter Wilberg is currently evolving. Currently established sites include:

 www.thenewtherapy.org

www.thenewgnosis.org

www.thenewphenomenology.org

www.thenewmedicine.org

www.thenewscience.org

www.thenewyoga.org

Sites in development include:

www.thenewworkplacecounselling.org

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Karin Heinitz
 

began her training as a Biodynamic Psychotherapist in Germany in 1984 while working as a counsellor and supervisor for social workers. She came to England in January 1986 where she set up in private practice as a Postural Integrator. She’d come to London to continue her training at the Gerda Boyesen Centre for Biodynamic Psychology and Psychotherapy and graduated there in 1989.  For the next 2 ½ years she worked at the Boyesen Centre seeing individual clients and teaching massage courses. She developed the first ethics statement of the Centre. In 1990 she moved, together with Peter Wilberg, to the Canterbury area where she was the only body-oriented psychotherapist until very recently. From 1992 she’s been living and working in Whitstable. She is a member of the London School of Biodynamic Psychotherapy and registered with the UKCP since 1993.

While still in training at the Boyesen Centre she began exploring the capacities of the 'inner body' experientially without a satisfying theoretical framework. Although these experiences were intriguing as such and helped her with clients who had involuntary and disturbing 'inner body' experiences, they were of only limited value in therapy sessions. Through her work with Peter on The New Therapy and The New Yoga she has developed a new and deeper understanding of the 'inner body', which allows her to make extensive practical use of it with clients and supervisees. Through her field-awareness -particularly of the spatial dimension of the client's inner and outer field, and of the sensual qualities of their and her own inner field - and through directed field resonance she offers her clients the experience of a different felt sense of themselves.  This new sense of self makes clients less fearful and more open to exploring new and different ways of relating to themselves and others. Quite often, this brings about dramatic changes in a very short time.

Karin has worked extensively with people suffering from depression, anxiety, abuse, emotional overwhelm, and physical symptoms which could not be diagnosed medically. Her research interest is in the relationship between those emotional disturbance and spiritual crises or questions, and in the contribution of  yogic meditation to psychotherapeutic work.

Karin works with individuals and groups, and is a trainer in The New Therapy. She offers Brief Psychotherapy, Awareness-Based Cognitive Therapy, Body Psychotherapy and Biodynamic Massage. A deeply joyful aspect of her work is the supervision she gives to counsellors,  psychotherapists and social and mental health workers.

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