Quotes by Ken Wilber

As important as this "take-charge" attitude was, it was still only half the equation. In addition to learning how to take control and assume responsibility, a person also needs to learn when and how to let go, to surrender, to go with the flow and not resist or fight it. Letting go versus taking control - this is, of course, just another version of being versus doing, that primordial polarity of yin and yang that assumes a thousand different forms and is never exhausted...

The individual realizes that, no matter how much suffering might occur, it doesn't fundamentally affect his or her real being. Suffering comes and goes, but the person now possesses the "peace that surpasseth understanding." The sage feels suffering, but it doesn't "hurt." Because the sage is aware of suffering, he or she is motivated by compassion, by the desire to help all those who suffer and think it's real.

Jung found that modern men and women can spontaneously produce virtually all of the main themes of the world's mythic religions; they do so in dreams, in active imagination, in free association, and so on. From this he deduced that the basic mythic forms, which he called archetypes, are common in all people, are inherited by all people, and are carried in what he called the collective unconscious. As even Jung realized, it is necessary to move away from the archetypes, to differentiate from them, to be free of their power. This process he called individuation.

Too close to touch, too obvious to see.

Divinity has one ultimate secret, which it will also whisper in your ear if your mind becomes quieter than the fog at sunset: the God of this world is found within, and you know it is found within: in those hushed silent times when the mind becomes still, the body relaxes into infinity, the senses expand to become one with the world- in those glistening times, a subtle luminosity, a serene radiance, a brilliantly transparent clarity shimmers as the true nature of all manifestation, erupting every now and then in a compassionate Radiance before whom all idols retreat, a love so fierce it adoringly embraces both light and dark, both good and evil, both pleasure and pain equally....

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

"the knowledge quest can only proceed funeral by funeral..."

....all the things and events we usually consider as irreconcilable, such as cause and effect, past and future, subject and object, are actually just like the crest and trough of a single wave, a single vibration.  For a wave, although itself a single event, only expresses itself through the opposites of crest and trough, high point and low point.  For that very reason, the reality is not found in the crest nor the trough alone, but in their unity...

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.

(new structures in consciousness) ... 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.

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.

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.