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This section of our website deals with the psyche and psychology, both personal and interpersonal. How can we maximize our mental potential and become more complete human beings? This includes healthy exploration of our conscious potential as well as our subconscious mind. Our dreams, personality types and archetypes are subjects for discussion. How can we [...]
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Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World – by Ken Wilber. I’ve read this book several times now, and need to return to it periodically to incorporate more of it’s insights into my thinking. I’ve previously explained that Ken Wilber is probably the most comprehensive thinker around. His writings lay out a system (a continually evolving system) that integrates science, psychology, spirituality and all the major streams of thought from all disciplines. If you think you have some great new insight or philosophical system you want to unleash on the world, read some Ken Wilber first, because he probably got there before you.
While many of the chapters in the book review material that Wilber has already written about, there are some important additions to his system. One of these is the post-modern insight that ALL of our truths are dependent on our cultural context and perspective. There is also new material on the lost “spiritual” line of development in our culture, and why it was lost. And don’t skip the appendixes to this book, because they contain critical material on “post-metaphysical spirituality”, which is a shocking but liberating concept.
All this comes together in a chapter on the “conveyer belt”. Wilber explains that only the major religions are equipped to become the vehicles that move the world into a higher level of consciousness, because religions own the great mythologies that speak to 70% of the world’s consciousness. Because of this, they can become the conveyors that usher humanity through difficult passages of transition.
Many people would find this book a bit complex, but for me, it’s going to become one of the most essential books in my library.
The Simple Feeling of Being is a unique anthology selected from the works of Ken Wilber. Ken is, in my opinion, the most comprehensive and enlightened philosopher of the modern age. His evolving system of integral philosophy takes in more truth and makes sense of more facts than anything else out there. If you haven’t read Ken Wilber, then I can absolutely guarantee that something is missing from your worldview.
That being said, the very comprehensiveness of Ken Wilber’s philosophy can be a bit daunting. Some of his more scholarly works in particular (such as Sex, Ecology and Spiritualtiy) can be a bit tough to wade through. Hence the purpose of this anthology.
The Simple Feeling of Being is a collection of the more “inspirational” of Ken’s writings, extracted from many of his major works. They include poetical passages, stories, illustrations and uplifting explanations. It is a book that you can keep at the bedside or in your back and open up when you simply need some spiritual rejuvenation. If you’ve ever read any of Ken Wilber and run across a passage in one of his books that sank into your heart and woke you up to the world of Spirit – it’s probably in this book. A few examples would probably serve well to illustrate.
“The world arises quietly this morning, shimmering on a radiant sea of transparent Emptiness. There is only this, vast, open, empty, clear, nakedly luminous. All questions dissolve in this single Answer, all doubts resolve in this single Shout, all worries are a ripple on this Sea of equanimity”.
“It is this primal resistance to unity consciousness that we must approach, not unity consciousness itself. For until you see precisely how you resist unity consciousness, all your efforts to ‘achieve’ it will be in vain, because what you are trying to achieve is also what you are unconsciously resisting and trying to prevent.”
“Since all things are already Spirit, there is no way to reach Spirit. There is only Spirit in all directions, and so one simply rests in the spontaneous nature of the mind itself, effortlessly embracing all that arises as ornaments of your own primordial experience. The unmanifest and the manifest, or emptiness and form, unite in the pure non-dual play of your own awareness – generally regarded as the ultimate state that is no state in particular.”
Some of the excerpts are only a few sentences, and non take more than a few minutes to read, so this book is perfect for contemplative reading – a lecto divino from a modern master.
I owe a lot to Ken Wilber. Ken was recommended to me at a stage in my journey when I was quite dogmatic and narrow minded. I went to the library and checked out “Up From Eden” – one of his earlier works. It was completely transformative. Over the course of a month as I read the book, Ken Wilber systematically knocked all the walls out of my personal philosophy and opened me up to the beautiful scenery waiting outside my previously cramped spiritual quarters.
It’s difficult to know where best to classify Ken on this page. While his “base” is probably in trans-personal psychology, the whole point of Wilber’s life-work is an approach he calls “integral”, or “AQUAL” (All-Quadrant, All-Levels). The idea is that reality consists of several different perspectives. In early philosophy, these were called the “Good”, the “True” and the “Beautiful”. Wilber has expanded them somewhat into four: the individual outside, the individual inside, the collective outside and the collective inside.
As the simplest example, take a human being. A behaviorist or biologist might examine that human being in terms of his individual external aspects, examining behavior, cellular mechanics, blood chemistry, height, weight, etc. This is the individual outside. But if we engage in this person in dialogue, as a psychotherapist, religious counselor or meditation teacher might, we get an entirely different set of information from the individual INSIDE. Then we can look at the person’s collective outside with a systems theorist, and note such things as housing, transportation systems, communication infrastructure – physical things that make up the system of which this person is a part. Finally, with anthropologists, ethicists and other students of the collective INSIDE, we look at the cultural groups of which the person is a part. We look at the interactions on a mental and spiritual level with other human beings.
The point is, each of these perspectives gives us different truths, and (most importantly), NONE of these truths is privileged over the others. We live in a time and culture that tends to favor individual external truths – hard science. Proponents of “flatland” as Wilber dubs this perspective, want to collapse everything else in the universe down to physics and chemistry. By doing so, they squash three additional quadrants of equally important truth out of consideration.
Wilber also spends a lot of time discussing developmental levels and states. This was particularly eye-opening to me. Individuals and societies can all be classified along a spectrum of development, and the attitudes and characteristics of individuals and cultures at the various stages of this spectrum are quite predictable. After reading Ken Wilber, you can observe the world around you and recognize that what you thought were differences in opinion among people and cultures are actually different stages of development.
Wilber’s writing is prolific. His goal is no less than creating a system into which all truths can be placed in their proper perspective and relationship. Wilber’s work really IS a “theory of everything”. Once you read Ken Wilber, you will find, when encounter a new idea or worldview, that you are mentally plotting it out on Wilber’s giant map of reality. And it always fits.
Wilbers work puts politics, science, religion, business, education and everything else into a new and interrelated perspective – one that you ignore at your peril. If you need a map to base your view of reality on, there is no better researched map than Ken Wilber.
Wilber has attracted some criticism, which is to be expected considering his system swallows up the truths of so many others. The fans of each piece of his jigsaw puzzle protest that their piece is much more important than Wilber credits – in fact, the ONLY important piece. There have been some personality clashes at his institute and on some of his projects. The fact that Ken has coined so many new concepts and words tends to make a discussion among wilberians sound like some kind of secret cult language. And if you don’t like getting into the details, Ken Wilber isn’t the writer for you. Someone like Eckhart Tolle or Alan Watts are better at simple profound generalities.
But you really MUST read him. See if you don’t find his concepts immediately useful. Below is a brief clip of Wilber discussing spirituality in the modern world:
“M-Theory has certainly got intellectuals thinking; that is, thinking differently. What would it mean if there were a theory that explained EVERYTHING? And just what does “everything” actually mean, anyway? Would this new theory in physics explain, say, the meaning of human poetry? Or how economics works? Or the stages of psycho-sexual development? Can this new physics explain the currents of ecosystems, of the dynamics of history, or why human wars are so terribly common?
In the interior of quarks, it is said, there are vibrating strings, and these strings are the fundamental units of everything. Well, if so, it is a strange everything, pale and anemic and alien to the richness of the world that daily presents itself to you and me. Clearly strings are an important PART of a larger world, fundamental to it, but not that significant, it seems. You and I already know that strings, should they exist, are only a tiny part of the picture, and we know this every time we look around, listen to Bach, make love, are caught transfixed at the sharp crack of thunder, sit rapturous at sunset, contemplate a radiant world that seems made of something so much more than microscopic, one-dimensional, tiny rubber bands…
The Greeks had a beautiful word, Kosmos, which means the patterned Whole of all existence, including the physical, emotional, mental and spiritual realms. Ultimate reality was not merely the cosmos, or the physical dimension, but the Kosmos, or the physical and emotional and mental and spiritual dimensions altogether. Not just matter, lifeless and insentient, but the living Totality of matter, body, mind, soul and spirit. The Kosmos! – now there is a real theory of everything! But us poor moderns have reduced the Kosmos to the cosmos. we have reduced matter and body and mind and soul and spirit to nothing but matter alone, and in this drab and dreary world of scientific materialism, we are lulled into the notion that a theory uniting the PHYSICAL dimension is actually a theory of EVERYTHING…
Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World
I owe a lot to Ken Wilber. Ken was recommended to me at a stage in my journey when I was quite dogmatic and narrow minded. I went to the library and checked out “Up From Eden” – one of his earlier works. It was completely transformative. Over the course of a month as I read the book, Ken Wilber systematically knocked all the walls out of my personal philosophy and opened me up to the beautiful scenery waiting outside my previously cramped spiritual quarters.
