- Conceptual Convergence -

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