Ken Wilber famous quotes

Authentic spirituality is revolutionary. It does not legitimate the world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world, it shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it undone.
-- Ken Wilber

#Self #World #Doe

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

#Consciousness #Humankind

Da Free John's phrase kept running through my mind: "Practice the wound of love... practice the wound of love." Real love hurts; real love makes you totally vulnerable and open; real love will take you far beyond yourself; and therefore real love will devastate you. I kept thinking, if love does not shatter you, you do not know love...
-- Ken Wilber

#Love #Running #Hurt

Conscious business.. business that is conscious of inner and outer worlds.. would therefore be business that takes into account body, mind, and spirit in self, culture, and nature. Put differently, conscious business would be mindful of the way that the spectrum of consciousness operates in the Big Three worlds of self and culture and nature.
-- Ken Wilber

#God #Self #Mind

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

#Spiritual #Mean #Reality

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

#Past #Facts #Figures

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

#Giving #Meditation #Mind

The truth will not necessarily set you free, but truthfulness will.
-- Ken Wilber

#Truthfulness

I rise to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today.
-- Ken Wilber

#Shining #Dawn #Today

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

#Truth #Important #Pieces

Great art grabs you, against your will, and then suspends your will. You are ushered into a quiet clearing, free of desire, free of grasping, free of ego, free of the self-contraction. And through that opening or clearing in your own awareness may come flashing higher truths, subtler revelations, profound connections. For a moment you might even touch eternity; who can say otherwise, when time itself is supendend in the clearing that great art creates in your awareness?
-- Ken Wilber

#Art #Self #Profound

You can indeed be aware of your body, but you can also be aware of your mind - you can right now notice all the thoughts and ideas and images floating in front of the mind's inward eye. You can, in other words, experience your mind, be aware of your mind. And it's very important to experience your mind directly, cleanly, intensely, because only by bringing awareness to the mind can you begin to transcend the mind and be free of its limitations.
-- Ken Wilber

#Eye #Ideas #Mind

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

#Spiritual #Teacher #Ego

If the majority of the "spiritual market" is drawn to prerational magic and myth, how do you reach the small group who are involved in genuine, laborious, demanding, transrational spiritual practice? This is very difficult, because both markets are referred to as "spiritual," but these two camps really don't get along very well-one is mostly translative, the other is mostly transformative, and they generally disapprove of each other-so how do you put them into one magazine without alienating them both?
-- Ken Wilber

#Spiritual #Practice #Two

"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

#Truth #Mean #Discipline

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

#Mean #Eye #Science

Real love will take you far beyond yourself;and therefore real love will devastate you.
-- Ken Wilber

#Love #Real #Real Love

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

#Reality #Two #Secret

You cannot have exterior development without interior development to hold it in place.
-- Ken Wilber

#Development

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

#Clouds #Self #Sky

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

#Rocks #Dust #Bird

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

#Moving #Order #Secret

Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences.
-- Ken Wilber

#Fundamentals #Physics #Significant

It is in the union of the Ascending and the Descending currents that harmony is found, and not in any war between the two. It seems that only when the Ascending and the Descending are united can both be saved. And if we - if you and I - do not contribute to this union, then it is very possible that not only will we destroy the only Earth we have, we will forfeit the only heaven we might otherwise embrace.
-- Ken Wilber

#War #Two #Heaven

I'm not nearly the saint some of my fans imagine and I'm nowhere near the devil my detractors wish, so you simply take both of those with a grain of salt.
-- Ken Wilber

#Devil #Criticism #Wish

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

#Life #Bangs #Strange

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

#Powerful #Taken #Self

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

#Love #Eye #Self

"Transcending the ego" thus actually means to transcend but include the ego in a deeper and higher embrace, first in the soul or deeper psychic, then with the Witness or primordial Self, then with each previous stage taken up, enfolded, included, and embraced in the radiance of One Taste. And that means we do not "get rid" of the small ego, but rahter, we inhabit it fully, live it with verve, use it as the necessary vehicle through which higher truths are communicated. Soul and Spirit include body, emotions, and mind; they do not erase them.
-- Ken Wilber

#Taken #Mean #Self

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

#Breathing #Emptiness #Consciousness

Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend.
-- Ken Wilber

#Motivational #Garden #Copies

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

#Healing #Opportunity #Compassion

Few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies.
-- Ken Wilber

#Long #Mind #Body

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.
-- Ken Wilber

#Morning #Reality #Sky

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

#Important #Different #Way

Most of us, I suspect, prefer our teachers to be of the Nice Guy variety.
-- Ken Wilber

#Teacher #Nice #Guy

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

#War #Two #Giving

What's my philosophy? In a word, integral. And what on earth — or in heaven — do I mean by integral? The dictionary meaning is fairly simple: comprehensive, balanced, inclusive, essential for completeness. Short definition, tall order.
-- Ken Wilber

#Philosophy #Mean #Simple

Be the most ethical, the most responsible, the most authentic you can be with every breath you take, because you are cutting a path into tomorrow that others will follow.
-- Ken Wilber

#Cutting #Path #Tomorrow

The ego is not a thing but a subtle effort, and you cannot use effort to get rid of effort - you end up with two efforts instead of one. The ego itself is a perfect manifestation of the Divine, and it is best handled by resting in Freedom, not by trying to get rid of it, which simply increases the effort of the ego itself
-- Ken Wilber

#Two #Perfect #Effort

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

#Dream #Yoga #Doors

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

#Clever #Book #People

The very desire to seek spiritual enlightenment is in fact nothing but the grasping tendency of the ego itself, and thus the very search for enlightenment prevents it. The 'perfect practice' is therefore not to search for enlightenment but to inquire into the motive for seeking itself. You obviously seek in order to avoid the present, and yet the present alone holds the answer: to seek forever is to miss the point forever. You always already are enlightened Spirit, and therefore to seek Spirit is simply to deny Spirit.
-- Ken Wilber

#Spiritual #Order #Practice

Evolution occurs in the world of time and space and form, whereas Spirit's primordial nature is finally timeless and Formless, prior to the of evolution but not other to it. We do not find Spirit or Emptiness by reaching some evolutionary Omega point in time, but rather by stepping off the cycle of time and evolution altogether (or ceasing to contract into it).
-- Ken Wilber

#Time #Space #World

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

#Believe #Creativity #Views

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

#Time #Self #Forever

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

#Beauty #Beautiful #Real

The nondual universe of One Taste arises as a spontaneous gesture of your own true nature.
-- Ken Wilber

#Beauty #Gestures #Taste

...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

#Love #Compassion #Want

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

#Fashion #Business #Mean

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

#Love #Forgiving #Littles

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

#Circles #Understanding #Chaos

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

#Profound #Connections #May

Spirit slumbers in nature, awakens in mind, and finally recognizes itself as Spirit in the transpersonal domains.
-- Ken Wilber

#Mind #Slumber #Spirit

There is intersubjectivity woven into the very fabric of the Kosmos at all levels.
-- Ken Wilber

#Woven #Fabric #Levels