Ken Wilber

Image of Ken Wilber
Meditation, then, is not so much a part of this or that particular religion, but rather part of the universal spiritual culture of all humankind--an effort to bring awareness to bear on all aspects of life. It is, in other words, part of what has been called the perennial philosophy.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Spiritual
Image of Ken Wilber
Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Fundamentals
Image of Ken Wilber
But the fundamentalists, the "creationists," seize upon these vacancies in the scientific hotel to pack the conferences with their delegates. They see the opening-creativity is an absolute-and they equate that absolute with their mythic god, and they stuff this god with all the characteristics that promote their own egoic inclinations, starting with the fact that if you don't believe in this particular god, you fry in hell forever, which is not exactly a generous view of Spirit.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Believe
Image of Ken Wilber
The most striking feature of the perennial philosophy/psychology is that it presents being and consciousness as a hierarchy of dimensional levels, moving from the lowest, densest, and most fragmentary realms to the highest, subtlest, and most unitary ones.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Philosophy
Image of Ken Wilber
An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct," the answer can only be, "All of them."
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Smart
Image of Ken Wilber
We must forgive each other our arising, for our existence always torments others. The golden rule in the midst of this mutual misery has always been, not to do no harm, but as little as possible; and not to love one another, but as much as you can.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Love
Image of Ken Wilber
One Taste is not some experience you bring about through effort; rather, it is the actual condition of all experience before you do anything to it. This uncontrived state is prior to effort, prior to grasping, prior to avoiding. It is the real world before you do anything to it, including the effort to "see it nondually".
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Real
Image of Ken Wilber
Evolution goes beyond what went before, but because it must embrace what went before, then its very nature is to transcend and include and thus it has an inherent directionality, a secret impulse, toward increasing depth, increasing intrinsic value, increasing consciousness. In order for evolution to move at all, it must move in those directions-there's no place else for it to go!
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Moving
Image of Ken Wilber
As you you deeply into your own awareness, and relax the self-contraction, and dissolve into the empty ground of your own primordial experience, the simply feeling of Being-right now, right here-is it not obvious at once?
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Self
Image of Ken Wilber
To be "integrally developed" does not mean that you have to excel in all the known intelligences, or that all of your lines have to be at level 3. But it does mean that you develop a very good sense of what your own psychograph is actually like, so that with a much more Integral self-image you can plan your future development.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Mean
Image of Ken Wilber
In Democracy, man exploits man; in Communism, it's the other way round.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Men
Image of Ken Wilber
Gaia's main problems are not industrialization, ozone depletion, overpopulation, or resource depletion. Gaia's main problem is the lack of mutual understanding and mutual agreement in the noosphere about how to proceed with those problems. We cannot rein in industry if we cannot reach mutual understanding and mutual agreement based on a worldcentric moral perspective concerning the global commons. And we reach the worldcentric moral perspective through a difficult and laborious process of interior growth and transcendence.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Ozone
Image of Ken Wilber
Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress--in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Plain Language
Image of Ken Wilber
...we cannot simply recommend love and compassion per se, for those unfold from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, and do we really want an increase in ethnocentric love?
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Love
Image of Ken Wilber
There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Spiritual
Image of Ken Wilber
Love is a time-honored way to transcend the separate-self sense and leap into the sublime; Treya and I held hands, closed our eyes, and jumped.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Love
Image of Ken Wilber
If Spirit has any meaning, it must be omnipresent, or all-pervading and all-encompassing. There can't be a place where Spirit is not, or it wouldn't be infinite. Therefore, Spirit has to be completely present, right here, right now, in your own awareness. That is, your own present awareness, precisely as it is, without changing it or altering it in any way, is perfectly and completely permeated by Spirit.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Way
Image of Ken Wilber
Prana is implicate to matter but explicate to mind; mind is implicate to prana but explicate to soul; soul is implicate to mind but explicate to spirit; and the spirit is the source and suchness of the entire sequence.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Wisdom
Image of Ken Wilber
Human beings have a variety of intelligences, such as cognitive intelligence, emotional intelligence, musical intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, and so on. Most people excel in one or two of those, but do poorly in the others. This is not necessarily or even usually a bad thing; part of Integral wisdom is finding where one excels and thus where one can best offer the world one's deepest gifts.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Emotional
Image of Ken Wilber
Great art suspends the reverted eye, the lamented past, the anticipated future: we enter with it into the timeless present; we are with God today, perfect in our manner and mode, open to the riches and the glories of a realm that time forgot, but that great art reminds us of: not by its content, but by what it does in us: suspends the desire to be elsewhere. And thus it undoes the agitated grasping in the heart of the suffering self, and releases us - maybe for a second, maybe for a minute, maybe for all eternity - releases us from the coil of ourselves.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Art
Image of Ken Wilber
The integral approach is committed to the full spectrum of consciousness as it manifests in all its extraordinary diversity. This allows the integral approach to recognize and honor the Great Holarchy of Being first elucidated by the perennial philosophy and the great wisdom traditions in general... The integral vision embodies an attempt to take the best of both worlds, ancient and modern. But that demands a critical stance willing to reject unflinchingly the worst of both as well.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Philosophy
Image of Ken Wilber
Being completely and totally present and at every single point of space and time, It is fully and completely present here and now, thus we can no more attain immanent Spirit then we could, say, attain our feet.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Feet
Image of Ken Wilber
And resting in the ocean, dipped into the sea, I find glimmers of One Taste everywhere.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Ocean
Image of Ken Wilber
As Hubert Benoit said, it is not the identification with the ego that is the problem, but the exclusive nature of the identification. When our self-identity expands beyond the ego, into the deeper psychic, then even into the Unborn and One Taste, the ego is simply taken up and subsumed in a grander identity. But the ego itself remains as the functional self in the gross realm, and it might even appropriately be intensified and made more powerful, simply because it is now plugged into the entire Kosmos.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Powerful
Image of Ken Wilber
But the real intent of my writing is not to say, you must think in this way. The real intent is to enrich: here are some of the many important facets of this extraordinary Kosmos; have you thought of including them in your worldview? My work is an attempt to make room in the Kosmos for all the dimensions, levels, domains, waves, memes, modes, individuals, cultures, and so on ad infinitum.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Real
Image of Ken Wilber
Both the old and new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact - forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Reality
Image of Ken Wilber
All sentient beings - all holons in fact - contain Buddha-nature - contain depth, consciousness, intrinsic value, Spirit - and thus we are all members of the council of all beings... And the ultimate objective truth is that all beings are perfect manifestations of Spirit or Emptiness
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Perfect
Image of Ken Wilber
..I sought a world philosophy-or an integral philosophy-that would believably weave together the many pluralistic contexts of science, morals, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world's great wisdom traditions. Not on the level of details-that is finitely impossible; but on the level of orienting generalizations: a way to suggest that the world really is one, undivided, whole, and related to itself in every way: a holistic philosophy for a holistic Kosmos, a plausible Theory of Everything.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Philosophy
Image of Ken Wilber
Some forms of truth are really forms of social power and oppression.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Oppression
Image of Ken Wilber
In fact, at this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking transformation would occur simply if everybody truly evolved to a mature, rational, and responsible ego, capable of freely participating in the open exchange of mutual self-esteem. There is the 'edge of history.' There would be a real New Age.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Real
Image of Ken Wilber
The single greatest world transformation would simply be the embrace of global reasonableness and pluralistic tolerance the global embrace of egoic-rationality (on the way to centauric vision-logic).
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Tolerance
Image of Ken Wilber
Conscious means "having an awareness of one's inner and outer worlds; mentally perceptive, awake, mindful." So "conscious business" might mean, engaging in an occupation, work, or trade in a mindful, awake fashion. This implies, of course, that many people do not do so. In my experience, that is often the case. So I would definitely be in favor of conscious business; or conscious anything, for that matter.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Fashion
Image of Ken Wilber
Global consciousness is not an objective belief that can be taught to anybody and everybody, but a subjective transformation in the interior structures that can hold belief in the first place, which itself is the product of a long line of inner consciousness development.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Long
Image of Ken Wilber
Subpersonalities can exist at different levels or memes, however, so that one can indeed have a purple subpersonality, a blue subpersonality, and so on. These often are context-triggered, so that one can have quite different types of moral responses, affects, needs, etc., in different situations.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Blue
Image of Ken Wilber
Truth, in the broadest sense, means being attuned with the real. To be authentically in touch with the true, and the good and the beautiful. Yes?
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Beauty
Image of Ken Wilber
Each band or level, being a particular manifestation of the spectrum, is what it is only by virtue of the other bands. The color blue is no less beautiful because it exists along side the other colors of a rainbow, and "blueness" itself depends upon the existence of the other colors, for if there were no color but blue, we would never be able to see it.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Beautiful
Image of Ken Wilber
There is intersubjectivity woven into the very fabric of the Kosmos at all levels.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Unity
Image of Ken Wilber
There are spiritual patterns at work in the universe and these announce themselves with impressive regularity wherever human minds and hearts attempt to attune themselves to the cosmos in all its radiant dimensions.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Spiritual
Image of Ken Wilber
Start as a human being in this culture, toss in madness, toss in mystical states, toss in being gay, toss in being HIV-positive, toss in religion that assures you God hates you for all of that - and then look me in the eye and tell me you can feel ok about yourself. I dare you. I just dare you.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Hate
Image of Ken Wilber
It is not quite right to describe One Taste as a "consciousness" or an "awareness," because that's a little too heady, too cognitive. It's more like the simple Feeling of Being. You already feel this simple Feeling of Being: it is the simple, present feeling of existence.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Simple
Image of Ken Wilber
Organismic awareness is awareness of the Present only - you can't taste the past, smell the past, see the past, touch the past, or hear the past. Neither can you taste, smell, see, touch or hear the future. In other words, organismic consciousness is properly timeless, and being timeless, it is essentially spaceless.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Past
Image of Ken Wilber
This transformation is already proceeding, and if we want to consciously find these evolutionary currents operating in our own being as well-if we want to consciously join Spirit-in-action-then the four quardrants can help us orient ourselves more effectively, can help us become more conscious of the evolutionary currents already flowing around us and through us and in us.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Four
Image of Ken Wilber
On my tombstone, I really hope that someday they will write: He was true but partial.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Tombstone
Image of Ken Wilber
Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Smart
Image of Ken Wilber
The Yoga of the Dream State has always held to be one of the fastest, most efficient ways of reaching a plateau experience of subtle and causal realms, thus quickly opening the door to stable adaptation at - and transcendence of - those realms.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Dream
Image of Ken Wilber
I can focus on writing, or I can get lost in wonderfully fun but endless conversations and produce nothing new at all. I count on those people who enjoy my work to understand this.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Fun
Image of Ken Wilber
The Witness is a huge step forward, and it is a necessary and important step in meditation, but it is not ultimate. When the Witness or the soul is finally undone, then the Witness dissolves into everything that is witnessed. The subject/object duality collapses and there is only pure nondual awareness, which is very simple, very obvious.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Simple
Image of Ken Wilber
Rather, Spirit, and enlightement, has to be something that you are fully aware of right now. Something you are already looking at right now... We are all already looking directly at Spirit, we just don't recognize it. We have all the necessary cognition, but not the recognition.
- Ken Wilber
Collection: Cognition