Quotes about Ken wilber

It is often said that in today's modern and postmodern world that the forces of darkness are upon us.  But I think not; in the Dark and the Deep there are truths that can always heal.  It is not the forces of darkness but of shallowness that everywhere threaten the true, and the good, and the beautiful, and that ironically announce themselves as deep and profound.  It is an exuberant and fearess shallowness that everywhere is the modern danger, the modern threat, and that everywhere nonetheless calls to us as savior.

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.

"The great and rare mystics of the past (from Buddha to Christ, from al-Hallaj to Lady Tsogyal, from Hui-neng to Hildegard) were, in fact, ahead of their time, and are still ahead of ours. In other words, they are not figures of the past. They are figures of the future."
-- Sex, Ecology, Spirituality , p. 253 Ken Wilber

"And so, please practice! Please let that be your guide. And I believe that you will find, if your practice matures, that Spirit will reach down and bless your every word and deed, and you will be taken quite beyond yourself, and the Divine will blaze with the light of a thousand suns, and glories upon glories will be given unto you, and you will in every way be home. And then, despite all your excuses and all your objections, you will find the obligation to communicate your vision. And precisely because of that, you and I will find each other. And that will be the real return of Spirit to itself."
-- Bodhisattvas will have to turn to politics, Interview with Frank Visser, 1995

IF WE WOULD AWAKEN,

WE WOULD BECOME SELECTORS OF THE BEAUTY

OF THE GARDEN GOD HAS GIVEN US

Ninety-nine percent of the world waits for change to happen on the outside so they can reflect it, but that is no accomplishment. If we would awaken, we would become selectors of the beauty of the garden God has given us. We would single out an aspect we desire to express and deliberately change our attitude towards life itself.

The little fable of the fox and the grapes shows the importance of imagination. Failing to obtain the grapes, the fox persuaded himself that they were sour and, by imagining them so he evoked, within himself, a change of attitude thereby no longer feeling the same way about the grapes.

Although this little fable is on a negative, or tragic tone, you can take the same story and make it a positive one by contemplating your noble concept of life.

Although you may not appear to have the talent to realize your desire, do not claim its possession is beyond you and therefore sour. Rather, rejoice in the knowledge that it is yours. Do this and you will produce an emotional response which is necessary for seedtime.

AS YOU SOW, YOU REAP

And whatever the form of your own resurrection, you will arise, driven not by the Great Search, but by your own Great Duty, your limitless Dharma, the manifestation of your own highest potentials, and the world will begin to change because of you. And you will never flinch, and you will never fail in that great Duty, and you will never turn away, because simple, ever-present awareness will be with you now and forever, even unto the end of the worlds, because now and forever and endlessly forever, there is only Spirit, only intrinsic awareness of just this, and nothing more.

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.

Early morning, the orange sun is slowly rising, shining forth in empty luminous clarity. The mind and the sky are one, the sun is rising in the vast space of primordial awareness, and there is just this. Yasutani Roshi once said, speaking of satori, that it was the most precious realization in the world, because all the great philosophers had tried to understand ultimate reality but had failed to do so, yet with satori or awakening all of your deepest questions are finally answered: it's just this.

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.

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.

I don’t think we’ve found a way to promote economic and political integration in a manner that benefits the vast majority of people in all societies…

In the end if you want to promote democracy and you believe in it, then you have to understand that voters usually see these grand political issues through the prism of their own experience, how it impacts themselves, their families, their communities, how they imagine their children will live. … If ordinary people don’t perceive that our grand ideas are working in their lives, then they can’t develop, the higher level of consciousness, if I can use a kind of touchy-feely word, that American philosopher Ken Wilber wrote a whole book about, called A Theory of Everything. He said, you know, the problem is the world needs to be more integrated but it requires a consciousness that’s way up here, and an ability to see beyond the differences among us. So I worry about that.

If a culture treats a particular illness with compassion and enlightened understanding, then sickness can be seen as a challenge, as a healing crisis and opportunity. Being sick is then not a condemnation or a moral judgement, but a movement in a larger process of healing and restoration. When sickness is viewed positively and in supportive terms, then illness has a much better chance to heal, with the concomitant result that the entire person may grown and be enriched in the process. ~ Ken Wilber ~

It was during this period that I stopped off in London and found a book called "A Brief History of Everything" by Ken Wilber.  Although strangely attracted to the book and to the cover, initially I couldn't bring myself to buy a book with such an arrogant title.  At that stage I hadn't discovered many Americans with a sense of irony and took the title to be literal.  (I have sinced discovered that Ken has a great sense of humour and most of our early communications were about "Absolutely Fabulous" and Eddie Izzard.)  The title is meant to be ironic but it is also strangely accurate.

KW:  Fred's first criticism had to do with the four drives of any holon.  In SES, I listed these as agency (horizontal individuation) and communion (horizontal linking), and self-transcendence (vertically moving up) and self-dissolution (vertically moving down).  Fred pointed out that the first three drives were, correctly, the healthy version of those drives; but for the fourth drive, I had incorrectly given the pathological version of the descending drive.  The healthy downward drive -- the drive of the higher to embrace and enfold the lower, which I call agape or compassion, or what might be called self-immanence (the dialectical opposite of self-transcendence) -- I actually gave as thanatos, which is not the embrace of the lower by the higher but the dissolution or regression of the higher to the lower.  When it came to vertically moving upward, I had correctly given that as Eros or self-transcendence, seeking out higher and wider wholeness.  The pathological version of Eros is phobos, which is not the transcendence of the lower but the repression of the lower.  But when it came to vertically moving downward, instead of giving the healthy agape -- where the higher embraces, enfolds, and "loves" the lower, as a molecule embraces its atoms -- I inadvertantly gave the pathological thanatos, where the higher merely dissolves into the lower, dies or decomposes (e.g., the molecules dissipate into their constitutive atoms).  So the four drives should be agency and communion, and self-transcendence and self-immanence (not self-dissolution).

This is a brilliant criticism, and of the hundreds of thousands of people who went over those ideas, only Fred spotted it.  (Incidentally, I still sometimes list the fourth drive as self-dissolution, simply because that is so much easier to understand in an introductory statement.  But my actual position should now be clear, thanks to Fred...

Shambhala:  [Laughing]  Actually, the most common ad hominen criticism as of late is that you are a very controlling person.  You have tried to build a huge and encompassing system because psychologically you want to control everything and everybody.

KW:  Yes, I've heard that, but only from critics who have never met me, which suggests to me that these critics are simply projecting their own shadow onto me.  Because the people who know me don't say that I am competitive or controlling.

Shambhala:  What do they say that you are?

KW:  Borderline psychotic.

True pluralism on the other hand, is always universal pluralism, (or integral-aperspectival): you start with the commonalities and deep structures that unite human beings--we all suffer, and triumph, laugh and cry, feel pleasure and pain, wonder and remorse; we all have the capacity to form images, symbols, concepts, rules; we all have 208 bones, two kidneys, and one heart; we are all open to a Divine Ground, by whatever name.  And then you add all the wonderful differences, surface structures, culturally constructed variants, and so on, that make various groups--and various individuals--all different, special, and unique.  But if you start with the differences and the pluralism, and never make it to the universal, then you have only the aprespectival madness, ethnocentric revivals, regressive catastrophes.

We are part and parcel of a single and all-encompassing evolutionary current that is itself Spirit-in-action, the mode and manner of Spirit's creation, and thus is always going beyond what went before--that leaps, not crawls, to new plateaus of truth, only to leap again, dying and being reborn with each new quantum lurch, often stumbling and bruising its metaphyscical knees, yet always getting right back up and jumping yet again.

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