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.
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