Wilber Quotes

#1. I once got to meet a man who many say is one of the most brilliant minds alive today. Ken Wilber is the most widely translated academic

Vishen Lakhiani

#2. 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

#3. I went to Duke University in the medical track. And then I decided I wanted to do something more creative, so I switched to biochemistry at Nebraska.

Ken Wilber

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

Ken Wilber

#5. 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

#6. Thus, he says, those who would "eliminate from the universe" what they think of as "inferior beings" would simply "eliminate Providence itself," whose nature it is to "produce all things and to diversify all in the manner of their existence.

Ken Wilber

#7. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#9. 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

#10. Even as it surreptitiously dipped into that dimension for its own hidden judgments, judgments which it forcefully and vehemently made and then flat-out denied making. "Empirical knowledge alone is true knowledge" - and where is the empirical proof for that?

Ken Wilber

#11. Becoming a leader is the same as becoming a fully integrated human being,

Ken Wilber

#12. 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

#13. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#15. 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

#16. Change of state is not the point; recognizing the Changeless is the point, recognizing primordial Emptiness is the point, and if you are breathing and vaguely awake, that state of consciousness will do just fine.

Ken Wilber

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

Ken Wilber

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

Ken Wilber

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made content; the self is made toast.

Ken Wilber

#22. 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

#23. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#25. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#27. 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

#28. Man, the mask of God,

Ken Wilber

#29. 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

#30. If you really want to change the world, you must first understand it adequately, or all you will do is reproduce in larger numbers your own ignorance.

Ken Wilber

#31. Whenever we moderns pause for a moment, and enter the silence, and listen very carefully, the glimmer of our deepest nature begins to shine forth, and we are introduced to the mysteries of the deep, the call of the within, the infinite radiance of a splendor that time and space forgot

Ken Wilber

#32. An integral approach acknowledges that all views have a degree of truth, but some views are more true than others, more developed, more evolved, more adequate.

Ken Wilber

#33. Anything you are exclusively attached to & identify with ends up distorting & limiting awareness.

Ken Wilber

#34. 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

#35. The hand of death touches every love that the Descenders profess for all and sundry, tears also streaming down the face with "compassion" written all over it.

Ken Wilber

#36. I saw only the glory of green emeralds, and radiant buddhas walking everywhere, and there was no I to see any of this, but the emeralds were there just the same.

Ken Wilber

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

Ken Wilber

#38. 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

#39. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#41. Starting with the Renaissance and running through the Enlightenment, there occurred what we might call "the great reversal." Suddenly, very suddenly, the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in - and the transition was bloody, arguably the bloodiest cognitive transformation in European history.

Ken Wilber

#42. The great and rare mystics of the past ... were, in fact, ahead of their time, and are still ahead of ours. In other words, they most definitely are not figures of the past. They are figures of the future.

Ken Wilber

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

Ken Wilber

#44. There are a substantial number of actual victims - of slavery's aftermath, gay bashing, criminal assault, sexual discrimination, physical abuse - whose genuine grievances are trivialized by victim chic. That is the real tragedy. Van

Ken Wilber

#45. The truth will not necessarily set you free, but truthfulness will.

Ken Wilber

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. Buddhist discipline is designed to transmute trishna, or egoic narcissism, into Karuna, Divine Narcissism; that is, to transmute self-love, which excludes love of others, into Self-love, which is love of others.

Ken Wilber

#49. 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

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

Ken Wilber

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

Ken Wilber

#52. Do you even recognize your own consciousness?

Ken Wilber

#53. 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

#54. I don't talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority.

Ken Wilber

#55. In other words, this world is not a sin; forgetting that "this world" is the radiance and Goodness of Spirit - there is the sin.

Ken Wilber

#56. Was it someone else? Was it not you yourself?

Ken Wilber

#57. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#59. 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

#60. 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

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

Ken Wilber

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

Ken Wilber

#63. 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

#64. 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

#65. The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.

Ken Wilber

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

Ken Wilber

#67. 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

#68. Like going to the dentist, where you write: "Dental appointment today. All of the dentists in Boulder are 'holistic.' They can't fill a cavity but they're good for your soul. Your teeth rot, but apparently your spirit prospers."

Ken Wilber

#69. Is this a topic whose time has truly come? The integration of science and religion? Or have I just written a clever book that temporarily impressed a few people and will otherwise go as quickly as it came?

Ken Wilber

#70. And gone the Godless destiny of death and desperation, and gone the madness of a life committed to uncare, and gone the tears and terror of the brutal days and endless nights where time alone would rule.

Ken Wilber

#71. 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

#72. "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

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. Writers and magicians do essentially the same thing, they create worlds with words and will.

James L. Wilber

#76. A natural hierarchy is simply an order of increasing wholeness, such as: particles to atoms to cells to organisms, or letters to words to sentences to paragraphs. The whole of one level becomes part of the whole of the next. In other words, natural hierarchies are composed of holons.

Ken Wilber

#77. If the soul wants to know God, it cannot do so in time. For so long as the soul is conscious of time or space or any other [object], it cannot know God.

Ken Wilber

#78. 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

#79. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#81. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#83. 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

#84. Religion is just coded spirituality.

Ken Wilber

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

Ken Wilber

#86. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#92. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#94. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#96. 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

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

Ken Wilber

#98. A key goal for an author of history is to persuade his or her readers to forget what they know and to relive the world as it unfolded for characters of the time - with outcomes uncertain.

Del Quentin Wilber

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

Ken Wilber

#100. 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