110+ Ken Wilber Quotes On Culture, Universe And World

Ken Wilber is an American philosopher, author, and public speaker. He is known for his popularization of the Integral Theory, which is a comprehensive framework for understanding reality. Wilber is considered to be one of the most influential and widely read contemporary American philosophers. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Ken Wilber on life, leadership, culture.

Top 10 Ken Wilber Quotes

1. You cannot have exterior development without interior development to hold it in place.
2. The truth will not necessarily set you free, but truthfulness will.
3. I rise to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today.
4. ...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?
5. The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.
6. In a special sense... the three great natural states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep contain an entire spectrum of spiritual enlightenment.
7. I don't have to agree with everything you say, but I should attempt at least to understand it, for the opposite of mutual understanding is, quite simply, war.
8. In Democracy, man exploits man; in Communism, it's the other way round.
9. Let's not forget that what is looking out of your eyes and hearing with your ears right now is already Spirit. And that Spirit, that I AMness, is always present in all sentient beings.
10. Eternity is not ever-lasting time but the real, unfading, indestructible, and timeless Present, for, as Schroedinger said, the present is the only thing that has no end.

Ken Wilber Short Quotes

• You can't have good without evil, pleasure without pain, and so on.
• Few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies.
• Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend.
• There is a way out, but the way out is really a way within.
• Do you even recognize your own consciousness?
• And resting in the ocean, dipped into the sea, I find glimmers of One Taste everywhere.
• Freedom is an endless meeting.
• Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.
• The only justifications for belief have the form "justified for me".
• Anything you are exclusively attached to & identify with ends up distorting & limiting awareness.

Ken Wilber Quotes About Life

The integral sage, the nondual sage, is here to show us otherwise. Known generally as "Tantric," these sages insist on transcending life by living it. They insist on finding release by engagement, finding nirvana in the midst of samsara, finding total liberation by complete immersion. — Ken Wilber

Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of mental illness, but of growing intelligence. — Ken Wilber

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

Meditation, then, is not so much a part of this or that particular religion, but rather part of the universal spiritual culture of all humankind--an effort to bring awareness to bear on all aspects of life. It is, in other words, part of what has been called the perennial philosophy. — Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber Quotes About Universe

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

I went to Duke University in the medical track. And then I decided I wanted to do something more creative, so I switched to biochemistry at Nebraska. — Ken Wilber

There is nothing in the universe but matter. — Ken Wilber

There are spiritual patterns at work in the universe and these announce themselves with impressive regularity wherever human minds and hearts attempt to attune themselves to the cosmos in all its radiant dimensions. — Ken Wilber

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

Ken Wilber Quotes About World

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

The single greatest world transformation would simply be the embrace of global reasonableness and pluralistic tolerance the global embrace of egoic-rationality (on the way to centauric vision-logic). — Ken Wilber

For authentic transformation is not a matter of belief but of the death of the believer; not a matter of translating the world but of transforming the world; not a matter of finding solace but of finding infinity on the other side of death. The self is not made content; the self is made toast. — Ken Wilber

The integral vision embodies an attempt to take the best of both worlds, ancient and modern. But that demands a critical stance willing to reject unflinchingly the worst of both as well. — Ken Wilber

This is the world of One Taste, with no inside and no outside, no subject and no object, no in here versus out there, without means, without path and without goal. And this, as Ramana said, is the final truth. — Ken Wilber

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

One of the extraordinary things about awakening is that it carries with it the realization that there is only Spirit. Even the things of the world that we look at as problems are simply part of the way the world manifests, because it does so in terms of opposites. — Ken Wilber

In the dream state, the mind and soul are set free to create as they please, to imagine vast worlds not tied to gross sensory realities but reaching out, almost magically, to touch other souls, other people and far-off places, wild and radiant images cascading to the rhythm of the heart's desire. — Ken Wilber

Boundary lines, of any type, are never found in the real world itself, but only in the imagination of the mapmakers. — Ken Wilber

If you really want to change the world, you must first understand it adequately, or all you will do is reproduce in larger numbers your own ignorance. — Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber Quotes About Love

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

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 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

Ken Wilber Quotes About Integral

"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

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

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

An integral approach acknowledges that all views have a degree of truth, but some views are more true than others, more developed, more evolved, more adequate. — Ken Wilber

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

Ken Wilber Quotes About Spiritual

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

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

There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other. — Ken Wilber

Religion is just coded spirituality. — Ken Wilber

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. — Ken Wilber

Authentic spirituality... does not render the self content, it renders it undone. — Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

When it comes to spiritual teachers, there are those safe, gentle, consoling, soothing, caring; and there are the outlaws, the living terrors, the Rude Boys and Nasty Girls of God realization, the men and women who are in your face, disturbing you terrifying you, until you radically awaken to who and what you really are. — Ken Wilber

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

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

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

Art. Its definitions are legion, its meanings multitudinous, its importance often debated. But amid the many contradictory definitions of art, one has always stood the test of time, from the Upanishads in the East, to Michelangelo in the West: art is the perception and depiction of the sublime, the transcendent, the beautiful, the spiritual. — Ken Wilber

Art is a window to The Infinite, and opening to the goddess, a portal through which you and I, with the help of the artist, may discover depths and heights of our soul undreamed of by the vulgar world. Art is the eye of the spirit, through which the sublime can reach down to us, and we up to it, and be transformed, transfigured in the process. — Ken Wilber

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

Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress--in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news. — Ken Wilber

AQAL is a map of samsara, a map of the prison, but if you gonna make a prison brake,you need a good map. (laughter) — Ken Wilber

In fact, at this point in history, the most radical, pervasive, and earth-shaking transformation would occur simply if everybody truly evolved to a mature, rational, and responsible ego, capable of freely participating in the open exchange of mutual self-esteem. There is the 'edge of history.' There would be a real New Age. — Ken Wilber

Global consciousness is not an objective belief that can be taught to anybody and everybody, but a subjective transformation in the interior structures that can hold belief in the first place, which itself is the product of a long line of inner consciousness development. — Ken Wilber

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

An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct," the answer can only be, "All of them." — Ken Wilber

To be "integrally developed" does not mean that you have to excel in all the known intelligences, or that all of your lines have to be at level 3. But it does mean that you develop a very good sense of what your own psychograph is actually like, so that with a much more Integral self-image you can plan your future development. — Ken Wilber

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

The Big Bang has made Idealists out of almost anybody who thinks. First there was absolutely nothing, then Bang! Something. This is beyond weird. Out of sheerest Emptiness, manifestation arises. — Ken Wilber

If humanity doesn't destroy the planet first, which is always a possibility because as Spirit threw itself out there, that included free will. So, if we don't blow ourselves up first, soul will become as common of a mature development in adults as mind currently is and, eventually, Spirit will become the common experience for humanity. — Ken Wilber

God does not lie in our collective past, God lies in our collective future; the Garden of Eden is tomorrow, not yetsterday; the Golden Age lies down the road, not up it. — Ken Wilber

But the real intent of my writing is not to say, you must think in this way. The real intent is to enrich: here are some of the many important facets of this extraordinary Kosmos; have you thought of including them in your worldview? My work is an attempt to make room in the Kosmos for all the dimensions, levels, domains, waves, memes, modes, individuals, cultures, and so on ad infinitum. — Ken Wilber

My opinion is that we have, in the person of Da Free John, a Spiritual Master and religious genius of the ultimate degree. I assure you I do not mean that lightly. I am not tossing out high-powered phrases to 'hype' the works of Da Free John. I am simply offering to you my own considered opinion: Da Free John's teaching is, I believe, unsurpassed by that of any other spiritual Hero, of any period, of any place, of any time, of any persuasion. — Ken Wilber

For what we don't realize today is just what the typical self of every previous stage failed likewise to comprehend: this is not the highest and greatest mode of consciousness which can be attained - there lie ahead the realms of the superconscious and the pitiful ego, by comparison, is as a speck of nothingness. — Ken Wilber

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

And as for baby-boomer parents cluck-clucking about illegal substances, ah, gimme a break. Still, I think I'll pass on the rave. But more power to 'em, I say. — Ken Wilber

A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries. A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory. The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean. — Ken Wilber

Meditation was invented as a way for the soul to venture inward, there ultimately to find supreme identity with Godhead. Whatever else it does, and it does many beneficial things, meditation is first and foremost a search for the God within. — Ken Wilber

Some forms of truth are really forms of social power and oppression. — Ken Wilber

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

In other words, all of my books are lies. They are simply maps of a territory, shadows of a reality, gray symbols dragging their bellies across the dead page, suffocated signs full of muffled sound and faded glory, signifying absolutely nothing. And it is the nothing, the Mystery, the Emptiness alone that needs to be realized: not known but felt, not thought but breathed, not an object but an atmosphere, not a lesson but a life. — Ken Wilber

Increasing consciousness = increasing complexity. — Ken Wilber

Society forces you to conform. — Ken Wilber

I think I was a born scientist. — Ken Wilber

The great and secret message of the experiential mystics the world over is that, with the eye of contemplation, Spirit can be seen. With the eye of contemplation, the great Within radiantly unfolds. And in all cases, the eye with which you see God is the same eye with which God sees you: the eye of contemplation. — Ken Wilber

Most of us are only willing to call 5% of our present information into question any one point. — Ken Wilber

I'll tell you what I think. I think sages are the growing tip of the secret impulse of evolution. I think they are the leading edge of the self-transcending drive that always goes beyond what went before. I think they embody the very drive of the Kosmos toward greater depth and expanding consciousness. I think they are riding the edge of a light beam toward a rendezvous with God. — Ken Wilber

One's sanctions for truth and goodness are established largely by individual preferences. — Ken Wilber

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

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. — Ken Wilber

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 — Ken Wilber

Rather, Spirit, and enlightement, has to be something that you are fully aware of right now. Something you are already looking at right now... We are all already looking directly at Spirit, we just don't recognize it. We have all the necessary cognition, but not the recognition. — Ken Wilber

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

I can focus on writing, or I can get lost in wonderfully fun but endless conversations and produce nothing new at all. I count on those people who enjoy my work to understand this. — Ken Wilber

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

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

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 work? Or the stages of psychosexual development? Can this new physics explain the currents of ecosystems, or the dynamics of history, or why human wars are so terribly common? — Ken Wilber

One Taste is not some experience you bring about through effort; rather, it is the actual condition of all experience before you do anything to it. This uncontrived state is prior to effort, prior to grasping, prior to avoiding. It is the real world before you do anything to it, including the effort to "see it nondually". — Ken Wilber

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

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

It is not quite right to describe One Taste as a "consciousness" or an "awareness," because that's a little too heady, too cognitive. It's more like the simple Feeling of Being. You already feel this simple Feeling of Being: it is the simple, present feeling of existence. — Ken Wilber

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

In other words, the real problem is not exterior. The real problem is interior. The real problem is how to get people to internally transform, from egocentric to sociocentric to worldcentric consciousness, which is the only stance that can grasp the global dimensions of the problem in the first place, and thus the only stance that can freely, even eagerly, embrace global solutions. — Ken Wilber

Saving the biosphere depends first and foremost on human beings reaching mutual understanding and unforced agreement as to common ends. And that intersubjective accord occurs only in the noosphere. Anything short of that noospheric accord will continue to destroy the biosphere. — Ken Wilber

I believe that evidence shows that there is a real spirit, a real Beach, but it is beneath no pavement whatsoever, for all pavements arise within it: Spirit is all-encompassing. It transcends everything, it includes everything. — Ken Wilber

You are not the one who experiences liberation; you are the clearing, the opening, the emptiness, in which any experience comes and goes, like reflections on the mirror. And you are the mirror, the mirror mind, and not any experienced reflection. — Ken Wilber

The more I go into I, the more I fall out of I. — Ken Wilber

A natural hierarchy is simply an order of increasing wholeness, such as: particles to atoms to cells to organisms, or letters to words to sentences to paragraphs. The whole of one level becomes part of the whole of the next. In other words, natural hierarchies are composed of holons. — Ken Wilber

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

Prana is implicate to matter but explicate to mind; mind is implicate to prana but explicate to soul; soul is implicate to mind but explicate to spirit; and the spirit is the source and suchness of the entire sequence. — Ken Wilber

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

Being completely and totally present and at every single point of space and time, It is fully and completely present here and now, thus we can no more attain immanent Spirit then we could, say, attain our feet. — Ken Wilber

Were you somebody different a thousand years ago? Will you be somebody different a thousand years from now? What is this One Self that is forever your own deepest being? Must you believe the lies of time? Must you swallow the insanity that One Spirit does not exist? Can you show me your Original Face, of which there is One and Only One in all the entire World? — Ken Wilber

Human beings are born and begin their evolution through the great spiral of consciousness, moving from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to perhaps integral, and from there perhaps into genuinely transpersonal domains. But for every person that moves into integral or higher, dozens are born into the archaic. — Ken Wilber

The most striking feature of the perennial philosophy/psychology is that it presents being and consciousness as a hierarchy of dimensional levels, moving from the lowest, densest, and most fragmentary realms to the highest, subtlest, and most unitary ones. — Ken Wilber

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

Like going to the dentist, where you write: "Dental appointment today. All of the dentists in Boulder are 'holistic.' They can't fill a cavity but they're good for your soul. Your teeth rot, but apparently your spirit prospers." — Ken Wilber

I don't talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority. — Ken Wilber

Perhaps the best place to begin with an integral approach to business is with.. oneself. In the Big Three of self, culture, and world, integral mastery starts with self. How do body and mind and spirit operate in me? How does that necessarily impact my role in the world of business? And how can I become more conscious of these already operating realities in myself and in others? — Ken Wilber

So it is a good idea to start simple, I think, and be very careful. There is a spiritual opening in the Kosmos. Let us be careful of how we fill it. The simplest is: Spirit or Emptiness is unqualifiable, but it is not inert and unyielding, for it gives rise to manifestation itself: new forms emerge, and that creativity is ultimate. Emptiness, creativity, holons. — Ken Wilber

Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans have yet devised for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning. — Ken Wilber

Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend. What all great gardens have in common are their ability to pull the sensitive viewer out of him or herself and into the garden, so completely that the separate self-sense disappears entirely, and at least for a brief moment one is ushered into a nondual and timeless awareness. A great garden, in other words, is mystical no matter what its actual content. — Ken Wilber

Organismic awareness is awareness of the Present only - you can't taste the past, smell the past, see the past, touch the past, or hear the past. Neither can you taste, smell, see, touch or hear the future. In other words, organismic consciousness is properly timeless, and being timeless, it is essentially spaceless. — Ken Wilber

Life Lessons by Ken Wilber

1. Ken Wilber's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the interconnectedness of all things, and the need to strive for greater self-awareness and personal growth.
2. He encourages individuals to strive for a balance between their physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual selves in order to achieve a higher level of consciousness.
3. Wilber's philosophy is based on the idea that we can create a better world by understanding and respecting the interconnectedness of all things, and by recognizing our own potential to become more conscious and compassionate beings.