Ken Wilber & Integral Theory Learn More Ken Wilber, a visionary thinker of inspired genius, is the developer of an integral “theory of everything” embracing the truths of all the world’s great traditions. He is the author of over twenty books, including A Brief History of Everything; Grace and Grit; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; Boomeritis; and Religion of Tomorrow—spanning the genres from full-length scholarly works to popular introductions, from essays to daily journals, from personal memoir to fiction. Wilber´s Integral Approach, a radical theory that helps us make sense of our world by including as many perspectives as possible, has vast applications, in areas from business to medicine, psychology to ethics, politics to religion, art to education, sexuality to personal relationships.
If everything is God, why is God so hard to find? Here Ken Wilber discusses the notion of maya, a Sanskrit word that is literally translated as “not that” and often interpreted as “illusion” or “magic”. The basic idea is that the entire manifest universe, everything that we can touch and taste and see, is like a veil that prevents us from recognizing our timeless identity as Spirit. In a sense, the universe is an imaginary projection of Spirit—but it is not other than Spirit.
It is not the universe itself that is an illusion, but rather the perception that the universe is separate from God. Nothing is separate from Spirit, including your ego, and the manifest universe is simply an ever-changing expression of Spirit in this moment. There is nothing to be sought, and there is nothing to be found. Everything you need to recognize Spirit is 100% in your consciousness, right now. As Ken often says, if you are confused about how to find Spirit, just be aware of your confusion, and rest in that effortless awareness. You are searching for something that you have never lost, something that is closer to you than your own skin.
There’s an interesting thing about types. You can have healthy and unhealthy versions of them. To say that somebody is caught in an unhealthy type is not a way to judge them but a way to understand and communicate more clearly and effectively with them.
For example, if each stage of development has a masculine and feminine dimension, each of those can be healthy or unhealthy, which we sometimes call “sick boy, sick girl.” This is simply another kind of horizontal typing, but one that can be extremely useful.
When introducing the Integral Approach, Ken Wilber writes, “What if we took literally everything that all the various cultures have to tell us about the human potential—about spiritual growth, psychological growth, social growth—and put it all on the table?” And “What if we attempted, based on extensive cross-cultural study, to use all of the world’s great traditions to create a composite map, a comprehensive map, an all-inclusive or integral map that included the best elements of all of them?” This is the goal of the Integral Approach.
Ultimately, the Integral Approach isn’t just interested in a theoretical map, but also in the coordination...
When I first met [Traleg Kyabgon], through the graciousness of our mutual friend and Shambhala founder, Sam Bercholz, Traleg had a list with two columns: 'Where Ken is right' and 'Where Ken is not so right', and we proceeded to have one of the most intelligent, Enlightened discussions on Integral thought that I have ever had.
"As it turns out, he and I agreed on much more than we disagreed on, and we gave several public workshops together, often focusing on the perils of an extreme postmodernism to a genuine spirituality. But what was so amazing about Rinpoche is that, even though a high-ranking teacher in the Tibetan system, he was no mere traditionalist. He wanted to keep Buddhism pure, but he also wanted it to advance into the modern and postmodern world, and he (and I) were deeply worried about what some of the popular forms of Buddhism were doing to both distort traditional understanding and forestall evolutionary advancement...
A Foreword to Compassionate Conversations by Ken Wilber Yet, as important as these voices are, almost all of them are still missing at least one very important piece of the puzzle. But we ...
This experiment does indeed exist, and there are in fact many who have made it—that’s what the esoteric Paths of the Great Liberation are all about. Many of the original meditative schools that ...
Lana Wachowski: Let’s see . . . always awkward getting started with this kind of thing because there is so much context, so many backstories and memories tucked into various corners of the integ...
