Ken Wilber Quote Vault #3 June 25, 2009
Posted by seeker767 in Uncategorized.Tags: Causal, Gross, Ken Wilber, nonduality, Satori, Subtle
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This website consists of a collection of wise words, interesting facts, and compelling videos. Click on the “Wise Words” tab near the top of the page for the wisdom of the ages, or, go for the “Videos” Selection. The home page (which you’re on) is devoted to quotes from my favorite author – Ken Wilber.
Ken Wilber’s “Great Nest of Being”:
But my training in Zen, my understanding…[was that] the ultimate state was not an experience. It was not a particular experience among other experiences, but the very nature and ground of all experiences, high or low. It was the vast background or Abyss (Ruysbroeck) out of which spring various experiential realities. In itself, therefore, it was not experiential at all; it had nothing to do with changes of state, with knowing this or that, with seeing this or that, with feeling this or that, because it was prior to all that, the very nature of this and every moment before I try to grasp at it… That is why the Tao is said to be beyond knowing or not knowing, right or wrong.
- The Simple Feeling of Being, 38
Yet I was trying to grasp the all as a particular experience – a Big Experience, to be sure, but an experience nonetheless – and that is precisely what prevents the discovery (because an experience is a knowing or a not-knowing, and not that which is prior to both). This is why Zen calls all higher experiences by a derogatory name: makyo, or “subtle illusions.” And, according to Zen, many other traditions mistake makyo for the ultimate state, simply because these extraordinary experiences are indeed more real than ordinary states. Nonetheless, all experiences, high or low, fall short of nondual consciousness as such, and thus eventually must be penetrated.
The point is that experiences, whether sacred or profane, high or low, are all based on the duality between subject and object, seer and seen, experiencer and experienced. Even in the soul-sphere, itself incomparably more real then the lower levels of matter, body, and mind, one is merely engineering for a subtler subject, a more extraordinary object. The witness of these divine states still remains intact. The real awakening, however, is the dissolution of the witness itself, and not a change of state in that which is witnessed.
Ken Wilber Quote Vault #2 June 5, 2009
Posted by seeker767 in Uncategorized.Tags: Divine, Godhead, Ken Wilber, oneness, Soul, Spirit
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[Nature is an] expression of the Real, impulse of the infinite, transparent to Eternity, is merely a shining surface on an ocean of unending Spirit, dancing in the daylight of the divine, hiding in the night of ignorance. For those who do not know the Timeless, nature is all they have; for those who do not taste Infinity, nature serves its last supper. For those in need of redemption, nature tricks you into thinking it alone is real. But for those who have found release, nature is the radiant shell in which deeper truth resides. So it is – nature, mind, and spirit – Nirmanakaya, Sambhogakaya, and Dharmakaya – gross, subtle, and causal – are an eternal trinity in the folds of the Kosmos, never lost, never found.
- One Taste, 346
There are several different ways that we can state… two important functions of religion. The first function – that of creating meaning for the self – is a type of horizontal movement; the second function – that of transcending the self – is a type of vertical movement (higher or deeper, depending on the metaphor). The first I have named translation; the second, transformation.
With translation, the self is simply given a new way to think or feel about reality. The self is given a new belief – perhaps holistic instead of atomistic, perhaps forgiveness instead of blame, perhaps relational instead of analytic. The self then learns to translate its world and its being in the terms of this new belief or new language or new paradigm, and this new and enchanting translation acts, at least temporarily, to alleviate or diminish the terror inherent in the heart of the separate self.
But with transformation, the very process of translation itself is challenged, witnessed, undermined, and eventually dismantled. With typical translation, the self (or subject) is given a new way to think about the world (or objects); but with radical transformation, the self itself is inquired into, looked into, grabbed by its throat and literally throttled to death.
Put it one last way: with horizontal translation – which is by far the most prevalent, widespread, and widely shared function of religion – the self is, at least temporarily, made happy in its grasping, made content in its enslavement, made complacent in the face of the screaming terror that is in fact its innermost condition. With translation, the self goes sleepy into the world, stumbles numbed and near-sighted into the nightmare of samsara, is given a map laced with morphine with which to face the world. And this, indeed, is the common condition of a religious humanity, precisely the condition that the radical or transformative spiritual realizers have come to challenge and to finally undo.
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.
- One Taste, 304-305
In short, no direct experience can be fully captured in words. Sex can’t be put into words; you’ve either had the experience or you haven’t, and no amount of poetry will take its place. Sunsets, eating cake, listening to Bach, riding a bike, getting drunk and throwing up – believe me, none of those are captured in words.
And thus, so what if spiritual experiences can’t be captured in words either? They are no more and no less handicapped in this regard than any other experience. If I say “dog” and you’ve had the experience, you know exactly what I mean. If a Zen master says “Emptiness,” merely adding more and more words will never, under any circumstances, convey it.
- Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, 279
When you practice meditation, one of the first things you realize is that your mind – and your life, for that matter – is dominated by largely subconscious verbal chatter. You are always talking to yourself. And so, as they start to meditate, many people are stunned by how much junk starts running through their awareness. They find that thoughts, images, fantasies, notions, ideas, concepts virtually dominate their awareness. They realize that these notions have had a much more profound influence on their lives than they ever thought. In any case, initial meditation experiences are like being at the movies. You sit and watch all these fantasies and concepts parade by, in front of your awareness. But the whole point is that you are finally becoming aware of them. You are looking at them impartially and without judgement. You just watch them go by, the same as you watch clouds float by in the sky. They come, they go. No praise, no condemnation, no judgment – just “bare witnessing.” If you judge your thoughts, if you get caught up in them, then you can’t transcend them. You can’t find higher or subtler dimensions of your own being. So you sit in meditation, and you simply “witness” what is going on in your mind. You let the monkey mind do what it wants, and you simply watch.
And what happens is, because you impartially witness these thoughts, fantasies, notions and images, you start to become free of their unconscious influence. You are looking at them, so you are not using them to look at the world. Therefore you become, to a certain extent, free of them. And you become free of the separate self-sense that depended on them. In other words, you start to become free of the ego. This is the initial spiritual dimension, where the conventional ego “dies” and higher structures of awareness are “resurrected.” Your sense of identity naturally begins to expand and embrace the cosmos, or all of nature. You rise above the isolated mind and body, which might include finding a larger identity, such as with nature or the cosmos – “cosmic consciousness,” as R.M. Bucke called it. It’s a very concrete and unmistakable experience.
And, I don’t have to tell you, this is an extraordinary relief! This is the beginning of transcendence, or finding your way back home. You realize that you are one with the fabric of the universe, eternally. Your fear of death begins to subside, and you actually begin to feel, in a concrete and palpable way, the open and transparent nature of your own being.
- “Stages of Meditation,” 357-358
In this Theory of Everything, 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…
- A Theory of Everything, 140
[The teachings of the world's greatest yogis, saints, and sages,] and their contemplative endeavors, were (and are) transrational through and through. That is, although all of the contemplative traditions aim at going within and beyond reason, they all start with reason, start with the notion that truth is to be established by evidence, that truth is the result of experimental methods, that truth is to be tested in the laboratory of personal experience, that these truths are open to all those who wish to try the experiment and thus disclose for themselves the truth or falsity of the spiritual claims – and that dogmas or given beliefs are precisely what hinder the emergence of deeper truths and wider visions.
Thus, each of these spiritual or transpersonal endeavors (which we will carefully examine) claims that there exist higher domains of awareness, embrace, love, identity, reality, self, and truth. But these claims are not dogmatic; they are not believed in merely because an authority proclaimed them, or because sociocentric tradition hands them down, or because salvation depends upon being a “true believer.” Rather, the claims about these higher domains are a conclusion based on hundreds of years of experimental introspection and communal verification. False claims are rejected on the basis of consensual evidence, and further evidence is used to adjust and fine-tune the experimental conclusions.
These spiritual endeavors, in other words, are scientific in any meaningful sense of the word, and the systematic presentations of these endeavors follow precisely those of any reconstructive science.
- Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, 273
Start with general doubt, says [Saint] Augustine, and doubt absolutely everything you can. You will find that you can doubt the reliability of logic (it might be wrong), you can even doubt the reality of sense impressions (they might be a hallucination). But even in the most intense doubt, you are aware of the doubt itself; in your immediate awareness there is certainty, even if it is only a certainty that you are doubting – and you can never shake that certainty. Any truth in the exterior world can be doubted, but always there is the certainty of interior immediateness or basic Wakefulness; and God, said Augustine, lies in and through that basic Wakefulness, whose certainty is never, and can never be, actually doubted…
The path to ultimate Reality is not outside; it is inside. Starting with reason, one goes within reason, to the basic immediacy to its base, and that immediacy takes me beyond reason to the Ground of the Kosmos itself. So that finally, and ultimately, the Truth is not in me or inside me or egoically locked up in me, but is rather beyond me altogether: the ground of intimate presence opens up beyond me to the timeless and eternal Being of all being. Going within me, I am finally free of me: and that is a timeless liberation from the fetters of being only me.
- Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, 367-369
Ken Wilber Quote Vault #1 May 7, 2009
Posted by seeker767 in Uncategorized.Tags: Ken Wilber, Liberation, nonduality, One Taste
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Some of my Favorite Quotes from Ken Wilber:
Pathways: And [what of] the pain that is involved [in life]?
Ken Wilber: Is freely chosen as part of the necessary Game of Life. You cannot have a manifest world without all the opposites of pleasure and pain. And to get rid of the pain – the sin, the suffering, the duhkha – you must remember who and what you really are. This remembrance, this recollection, this anamnesis – “Do this in Remembrance of Me – means, “Do this in Remembrance of the Self that You Are” – Tat Tvam Asi. The great mystical religions the world over consist of a series of profound practices to quiet the small self that we pretend we are – which causes the pain and suffering that you feel – and awaken as the Great Self that is our own true ground and goal and destiny – “Let this consciousness be in you which was in Christ Jesus.”
Pathways: Is this realization an all-or-nothing affair?
Ken Wilber: Not usually. It’s often a series of glimpses of One Taste – glimpses of the fact that you are one with absolutely all manifestation, in its good and bad aspects, in all its frost and fever, its wonder and its pain. You are the Kosmos, literally. But you tend to understand this ultimate fact in increasing glimpses of the infinity that you are, and you realize exactly why you started this wonderful, horrible Game of Life. But it is absolutely not a cruel Game, not ultimately, because you, and you alone, instigated this Drama, this Lila, this Kenosis.
Pathways: But what about the notion that these experiences of “One Taste” or “Kosmic Consciousness” are just a byproduct of meditation, and therefore aren’t “really real”?
Ken Wilber: Well, that can be said of any type of knowledge that depends on an instrument. “Kosmic Consciousness” often depends on the instrument of meditation. So what? Seeing the nucleus of a cell depends on a microscope. Do we then say that the cell nucleus isn’t real because it’s only a by-product of a microscope? Do we say the moons of Jupiter aren’t real because they depend on a telescope? The people who raise this objection are almost always people who don’t want to look through the instrument of meditation, just as Churchman refused to look through Galileo’s telescope and thus acknowledge the moons of Jupiter. Let them live with their refusal. But let us – to the best of our ability, and hopefully driven by the best of charity of compassion – try to convince them to look, just once, and see for themselves. Not coerce them, just invite them. I suspect a different world might open for them, a world that has been abundantly verified by all who look through the telescope, and microscope, of meditation.
- One Taste, 474-476
The one thing I do know, and that I would like to emphasize, is that any integral theory is just that – a mere theory. I am always surprised, or rather shocked, at the common perception that I am recommending an intellectual approach to spirituality, when that is the opposite of my view. Just because an author writes, say, a history of dancing, does not mean that the author is advocating that people stop dancing and merely read about it instead. I have written academic treatises that cover areas such as spirituality and its relation to a larger scheme of things, but my recommendation is always that people take up an actual spiritual practice, rather than merely read about it. An integral approach to dancing says, take up dancing itself, and sure, read a book about it, too. Do both, but in any event, don’t merely read the book. That’s like taking a vacation to Bermuda by sitting at home and looking through a book of maps. My books are maps, but please, go to Bermuda and see for yourself.
-Foreword to Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion by Frank Visser, pp. xii-xv
All answers to that question, “Who am I?,” stem precisely from this basic procedure of drawing a boundary line between self and not-self. Once the general boundary lines have been drawn up, the answers to that question become very complex – scientific, theological, economic – or they may remain most simple and unarticulated. But any possible answer depends on first drawing the boundary line.
The most interesting thing about this boundary line is that it can and frequently does shift. It can be redrawn. In a sense the person can remap her soul and find in it territories she never thought possible, attainable, or even desirable. As we have seen, the most radical re-mapping or shifting of the boundary line occurs in experiences of the supreme identity, for here the person expands her self-identity boundary to include the entire universe. We might even say that she loses the boundary line altogether, for when she is identified with the “one harmonious whole” there is no longer any outside or inside, and so nowhere to draw the line.
- No Boundary, 436-437
Well, a glimmer, a taste, a hint of the nondual – this is easy enough to catch. But as for the Nondual traditions, this is just the beginning. As you rest in that uncontrived state of pure immediateness or pure freedom, then strange things start to happen. All of the subjective tendencies that you had previously identified with – all of those little selves and subjects that held open the gap between the seer and the seen – they start burning in the freedom of nonduality. They all scream to the surface and die, and this can be a very interesting period.
As you rest in this primordial freedom of One Taste, you are no longer acting on these subjective inclinations, so they basically die of boredom, but it’s still a death, and the death rattles from this liberation are very intense. You don’t really have to do anything, except hold on – or let go – they’re both irrelevant. It’s all spontaneously accomplished by the vast expanse of primordial freedom. But you are still getting burned alive, which is just the most fun you can have without smiling.
- A Brief History of Everything, 264-265
But the ego, convinced that it can become even more entrenched, decides to play the game of getting rid of itself – simply because, as long as it is playing that game, it obviously continues to exist (who else is playing the game?). As Chuang Tzu pointed out long ago, “Is not the desire to get rid of the ego itself a manifestation of ego?”
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 ego, which simply increases the effort of ego itself.
- One Taste, 533-534
Scott Warren: How long does it take to write a book?
Ken Wilber: My usual pattern of writing is, I read hundreds of books during the year, and a book forms in my head – I write the book in my head. Then I sit down and enter it on computer, which usually takes a month or two, maybe three.
Scott Warren: So all these books took a few months to write?
Ken Wilber: Yes, except Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. That took me three years, really excruciating years. But the amount of actual writing time itself was still fairly short, several months.
Scott Warren: Why excruciating? What happened?
Ken Wilber: Well, if you think about a book like The Spectrum of Consciousness, or The Atman Project, those were difficult books to conceive because you’re trying to fit together dozens of different schools of psychology. But those books only covered the Upper-Left quadrant [subjectivity]. In SES I was trying to pull together dozens of disciplines in all four quadrants [domains of knowledge], and this was a seemingly unending nightmare. So I really closed in on myself, and for three years I lived exactly the type of life that many people think I live all the time – namely, I really became a hermit. In fact, apart from grocery shopping and such, I saw exactly four people in three years. It turned out to be very close to a traditional three-year silent retreat. It was by far the most difficult voluntary thing I’ve ever done.
Scott Warren: Didn’t you go nuts?
Ken Wilber: The worst part came about seven months into the retreat. I found that what I missed most was not sex, and not talking, but skin contact – simple human touch. I ached for simple touching, I had what I started calling “skin hunger.” My whole body seemed to ache with skin hunger, and for about three or four months, each day when I finished work, I would sit down and just start crying. I’d cry for about half an hour. It just really hurt. But what can you do in these cases except witness it? So eventually a type of meditative equanimity started to develop toward this skin hunger, and I found that this very deep need seemed to burn away, at least to some degree, precisely because of the awareness that I was forced to give it. After that, my own meditation took a quantum leap forward – it was shortly thereafter that I started having glimpses of constant consciousness, or a mirrorlike awareness that continued into the dream state and the deep sleep state. All of this came about, I think, because I was not allowed to act on this skin hunger, I was forced to be aware of it, to bring consciousness to it, to witness it and not merely act it out. This skin hunger is a very primitive type of grasping, a very deep type of desire, of subjective identity, and by witnessing it, making it an object, I ceased identifying with it, I transcended it to some degree, and that released my own consciousness from this most ancient of biological drives. But it was a very rocky roller-coaster ride for a while.
- One Taste, 392-393
The great and rare mystics of the past (from Buddha to Christ, from al-Hallaj to Lady Tsogyal, from Hui-neng to Hildegard) were, in fact, ahead of their time, and still ahead of ours. In other words, they most definitely are not figures of the past. They are figures of the future.
In their spirituality, they did not tap into yesterday, they tapped into tomorrow. In their profound awareness, we do not see the setting sun, but the new dawn. They absolutely did not inherit the past, they inherited the future….
We are yet the bastard sons and daughters of an evolution not yet done with us, caught always between the fragments of yesterday and the unions of tomorrow, unions apparently destined to carry us far beyond anything we can possibly recognize today, and unions that, like all such births, are exquisitely painful and unbearably ecstatic. And with yet just the slightest look – once again, within – new marriages unfold, and the drama carries on.
- Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, 261-262
So my promise to Treya – the only promise that she made me repeat over and over – my promise that I would find her again really meant that I had promised to find my own enlightened Heart…
And I know, in those last few moments of death itself, and during the night that followed, when Treya’s luminosity overwhelmed my soul, and outshone the finite world forever, that it all became perfectly clear to me. There are no lies left in my soul, because of Treya. And Treya, honey, dear sweet Treya, I promise to find you forever and forever and forever in my Heart, as the simple awareness of what is.
- Grace and Grit, 477
