Ken Wilber Quotes

#1. It is flat-out strange that something-that anything-is happening at all. There was nothing then a Big Bang, then here we all are. This is extremely weird.

Ken Wilber

#2. What's my philosophy? In a word, integral.

Ken Wilber

#3. The integral sage, the nondual sage, is here to show us otherwise. Known generally as "Tantric," these sages insist on transcending life by living it. They insist on finding release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of samsara, finding total liberation by complete immersion.

Ken Wilber

#4. I don't believe that any human mind is capable of 100 percent error ... Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.

Ken Wilber

#5. The nondual universe of One Taste arises as a spontaneous gesture of your own true nature.

Ken Wilber

#6. So spirit is both the highest "level" in the holarchy, but it's also the paper on which the entire holarchy is written. It's the highest rung in the ladder, but it's also the wood out of which the entire ladder is made.

Ken Wilber

#7. And as for baby-boomer parents cluck-clucking about illegal substances, ah, gimme a break. Still, I think I'll pass on the rave. But more power to 'em, I say.

Ken Wilber

#8. When the thunder roars, do you not hear your Self? When the lightening cracks, do you not see your Self? When clouds float quietly across the sky, is this not your very own limitless Being, waving back at you?

Ken Wilber

#9. I had my own test, better than Turing's: when a computer could genuinely convince me that it wanted to commit suicide.

Ken Wilber

#10. AQAL is a map of samsara, a map of the prison, but if you gonna make a prison brake,you need a good map. (laughter)

Ken Wilber

#11. Most of us, I suspect, prefer our teachers to be of the Nice Guy variety.

Ken Wilber

#12. Spirit slumbers in nature, awakens in mind, and finally recognizes itself as Spirit in the transpersonal domains.

Ken Wilber

#13. Spirit forgets that it's Spirit and condenses to a smaller version of itself, which is soul. Soul forgets that it's soul and condenses to mind. Mind forgets that it's mind and condenses to body. Body forgets that it's body and condenses to the lowest dimension that you can have, which is matter.

Ken Wilber

#14. THE ULTIMATE METAPHYSICAL SECRET, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two.

Ken Wilber

#15. The fundamental message is self-righteous, and it takes this form: 'T. S. Eliot is a homophobe and I am not. Therefore, I am a better person than Eliot.' To which the proper response is: 'But T. S. Eliot could really write, and you can't.

Ken Wilber

#16. Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress
in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news.

Ken Wilber

#17. And through the opening or clearing in your own awareness may come flashing higher truths, subtler revelations, profound connections. For a moment you might even touch eternity.

Ken Wilber

#18. The adventure of awakening is among the most universal of human dramas.

Ken Wilber

#19. 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

#20. Man, the mask of God,

Ken Wilber

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. I was slowly learning that love did not mean holding on, which I had always thought, but rather letting go.

Ken Wilber

#24. To develop a more or less accurate self-image ... is simply to gain a comprehensive awareness of those facets of yourself which you didn't know existed.
And these facets are easily spotted because they show up as your symptoms.

Ken Wilber

#25. The only justifications for belief have the form "justified for me".

Ken Wilber

#26. And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself.

Ken Wilber

#27. You are not the one who experiences liberation; you are the clearing, the opening, the emptiness, in which any experience comes and goes, like reflections on the mirror. And you are the mirror, the mirror mind, and not any experienced reflection.

Ken Wilber

#28. Anytime a sage displays humanness - in regard to money, food, sex, relationships - we are shocked, shocked, because we are planning to escape life altogether, not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us.

Ken Wilber

#29. Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans have yet devised for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning.

Ken Wilber

#30. There is nothing in the universe but matter.

Ken Wilber

#31. These two enormous forces - truth and meaning - are at war in today's world ... And something sooner or later has to give.

Ken Wilber

#32. Do you even recognize your own consciousness?

Ken Wilber

#33. 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

#34. There are several different meanings of the words religion and spirituality, all of which are important. The whole point about an integral or comprehensive approach is that it must find a way to believably include all of those important meanings in a coherent whole.

Ken Wilber

#35. On my tombstone, I really hope that someday they will write: He was true but partial ...

Ken Wilber

#36. 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

#37. The first step toward a genuine theory of consciousness, I believe, is the realization that consciousness is not located in the organism. Rather, consciousness is a four-quadrant affair, and it exists, if it exists at all, distributed across all four quadrants, anchored equally in each.12

Ken Wilber

#38. The point is to unify the opposites, both positive and negative, by discovering a ground which transcends and encompasses both.

Ken Wilber

#39. Real love will take you far beyond yourself; and therefore real love will devastate you.

Ken Wilber

#40. The noosphere, not the biosphere, would determine rights and responsibilities. And these rights were not previously repressed, they were previously meaningless (they were not oppressed, they had simply not yet emerged).

Ken Wilber

#41. So perhaps we can learn to value the differences between the male and female value spheres. Those differences, even according to the radical feminists, appear to be here for good - but we can learn to value them with more equal emphasis. How to do so is one of the things we might want to talk about.

Ken Wilber

#42. You can't have good without evil, pleasure without pain, and so on.

Ken Wilber

#43. Precisely because it is all the purest Emptiness, each relative phenomenon is allowed to be itself even more intensely, because it no longer contends with the Divine, but simply expresses It. And

Ken Wilber

#44. 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

#45. "Integrative" simply means that this approach attempts to include as many important truths from as many disciplines as possible-from East as well as the West, from premodern and modern and postmodern, from the hard sciences of physics to the tender sciences of spirituality.

Ken Wilber

#46. 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

#47. To understand the whole it is necessary to understand the parts. To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole. Such is the circle of understanding.

Ken Wilber

#48. That is, my experience is that when the bodymind is strong and healthy - not ascetically starved and despised - it is all the easier to drop it, transcend it, let it go.

Ken Wilber

#49. 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

#50. I rise to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today.

Ken Wilber

#51. 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

#52. Between life's stimuli and our habitual responses exists choice.

Ken Wilber

#53. The Self doesn't live forever in time, it lives in the timeless present prior to time, prior to history, change, succession. The Self is present as Pure Presence, not as everlasting duration, a rather horrible notion.

Ken Wilber

#54. Religion is just coded spirituality.

Ken Wilber

#55. As Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin knew, the future of humankind is God-consciousness.

Ken Wilber

#56. Put bluntly, the ego is not an obstruction to Spirit, but a radiant manifestation of Spirit. All Forms are not other than Emptiness, including the form of the ego. It is not necessary to get rid of the ego, but simply to live with it a certain exuberance.

Ken Wilber

#57. Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences.

Ken Wilber

#58. The Big Bang has made Idealists out of almost anybody who thinks. First there was absolutely nothing, then Bang! Something. This is beyond weird. Out of sheerest Emptiness, manifestation arises.

Ken Wilber

#59. 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

#60. 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

#61. Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend.

Ken Wilber

#62. The basic idea of integral transformative practice (ITP) is simple: the more aspects of our being that we simultaneously exercise, the more likely that transformation will occur.

Ken Wilber

#63. The more I go into I, the more I fall out of I.

Ken Wilber

#64. Matter begins evolving back to Spirit and, when it's reached, the whole process begins over again for the billionth time.

Ken Wilber

#65. There is intersubjectivity woven into the very fabric of the Kosmos at all levels.

Ken Wilber

#66. That which one can deviate from is not the true Tao.

Ken Wilber

#67. One of the first steps toward an integral postmodernity is the development and establishment of a genuine environmental ethics, or a moral and ethical stance to nonhuman holons.

Ken Wilber

#68. 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

#69. This narrowed self-image we will be calling the persona,

Ken Wilber

#70. You have to know that there actually is a transcendental something, if you are going to free anybody from anything - if there is no beyond-the-given, there is no freedom from the given, and liberation is futile.

Ken Wilber

#71. The belief in the sanctity of one's idiosyncrasy - especially if it be a group idiosyncrasy, and therefore sustained and intensified by mutual flattery - is rapidly converted into a belief in its superiority. More

Ken Wilber

#72. And resting in the ocean, dipped into the sea, I find glimmers of One Taste everywhere.

Ken Wilber

#73. Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of mental illness, but of growing intelligence.

Ken Wilber

#74. Society forces you to conform.

Ken Wilber

#75. Increasing consciousness = increasing complexity.

Ken Wilber

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. Because the amazing fact is that truth alone will not set you free. Truthfulness will set you free.

Ken Wilber

#79. The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief. Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience. The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation.

Ken Wilber

#80. You cannot have exterior development without interior development to hold it in place.

Ken Wilber

#81. Few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies.

Ken Wilber

#82. The understanding of "evolutionary consciousness" is perhaps the most important thing lacking in spiritual practices today. Evolution means growth and development. This means that there are aspects of reality that have not yet arisen in our consciousness. But they will arise if we grow.

Ken Wilber

#83. This profoundly disturbed me, because I had had several kensho or satori-like experiences (glimpses of One Taste), but they were all generally confined to the waking state.

Ken Wilber

#84. The cure for the disaster of modernity is to address the dissociation, not attempt to erase the differentiation!

Ken Wilber

#85. In a special sense ... the three great natural states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep contain an entire spectrum of spiritual enlightenment.

Ken Wilber

#86. The meaning of a statement is the means of its enactment. Once

Ken Wilber

#87. This is the world of One Taste, with no inside and no outside, no subject and no object, no in here versus out there, without means, without path and without goal. And this, as Ramana said, is the final truth.

Ken Wilber

#88. I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody - including me - has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.

Ken Wilber

#89. The founders and grand theorists of modern (quantum and relativity) physics: Einstein, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Bohr, Eddington, Pauli, de Broglie, Jeans, and Planck.

Ken Wilber

#90. They are structures that we build every time we engage in a thought that's just a little bit higher than a thought we had a moment before, or an activity that's just a little bit more noble than the activity we engaged in a moment before.

Ken Wilber

#91. A full-spectrum approach to human consciousness and behavior means that men and women have available to them a spectrum of knowing -a spectrum that includes, at the very least, the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of spirit.

Ken Wilber

#92. Evolution does not isolate us from the rest of the Kosmos, it unites us with the rest of the Kosmos: the same currents that produced birds from dust and poetry from rocks produce egos from ids and sages from egos.

Ken Wilber

#93. Freedom is an endless meeting.

Ken Wilber

#94. the Many returning to and embracing the One is Good, and is known as wisdom; the One returning to and embracing the Many is Goodness, and is known as compassion.

Ken Wilber

#95. What is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It's not the spirit in you, since that is already enlightened, and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher.

Ken Wilber

#96. All the Ping-Pong and pool tables, on-site chefs, Nerf hoops, and stereo systems cannot make up for the truth that some places work people like dogs.

Ken Wilber

#97. Saving the biosphere depends first and foremost on human beings reaching mutual understanding and unforced agreement as to common ends. And that intersubjective accord occurs only in the noosphere. Anything short of that noospheric accord will continue to destroy the biosphere.

Ken Wilber

#98. The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.

Ken Wilber

#99. Some forms of truth are really forms of social power and oppression.

Ken Wilber

#100. I think I was a born scientist.

Ken Wilber