Top 100 Ken Wilber Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “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

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “Between life’s stimuli and our habitual responses exists choice.”

— Ken Wilber

58. “Few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies.”

— Ken Wilber

59. “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

60. “At the Integral stages of development, the entire universe starts to make sense, to hang together, to actually appear as a uni-verse – a “one world” – a single, unified, integrated world that unites not only different philosophies and ideas about the world, but different practices for growth and development as well.”

— Ken Wilber

61. “The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.”

— Ken Wilber

62. “Spirit slumbers in nature, awakens in mind, and finally recognizes itself as Spirit in the transpersonal domains.”

— Ken Wilber

63. “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

64. “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

65. “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

66. “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

67. “As you you deeply into your own awareness, and relax the self-contraction, and dissolve into the empty ground of your own primordial experience, the simply feeling of Being-right now, right here-is it not obvious at once?”

— Ken Wilber

68. “Subpersonalities can exist at different levels or memes, however, so that one can indeed have a purple subpersonality, a blue subpersonality, and so on. These often are context-triggered, so that one can have quite different types of moral responses, affects, needs, etc., in different situations.”

— Ken Wilber

69. “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

70. “Some forms of truth are really forms of social power and oppression.”

— Ken Wilber

71. “Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend.”

— Ken Wilber

72. “And so now, today, one cannot think of the greats – Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Marx, Fichte, Freud, Nietzsche, Einstein, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Schelling – the whole Germanic sphere – without thinking, at some point, of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Sobibor and Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Chelmno. My God, they have names, as if they were human.”

— Ken Wilber

73. “There is nothing in the universe but matter.”

— Ken Wilber

74. “I was slowly learning that love did not mean holding on, which I had always thought, but rather letting go.”

— Ken Wilber

75. “Was it someone else? Was it not you yourself?”

— Ken Wilber

76. “So spirit is both the highest “level” in the holarchy, but it’s also the paper on which the entire holarchy is written. It’s the highest rung in the ladder, but it’s also the wood out of which the entire ladder is made.”

— Ken Wilber

77. “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

78. “Most of us, I suspect, prefer our teachers to be of the Nice Guy variety.”

— Ken Wilber

79. “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

80. “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

81. “Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress – in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news.”

— Ken Wilber

82. “Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever.”

— Ken Wilber

83. “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

84. “And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself.”

— Ken Wilber

85. “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

86. “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

87. “Suffering is not just “negative”; it is a bond through which we all touch each other. Suffering, truly, is the first grace. Dear.”

— Ken Wilber

88. “On my tombstone, I really hope that someday they will write: He was true but partial...”

— Ken Wilber

89. “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

90. “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

91. “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

92. “She runs in my blood and beats in my heart; she is part of me, always, so I don’t have to picture her to remember her.”

— Ken Wilber

93. “Buddhist discipline is designed to transmute trishna, or egoic narcissism, into Karuna, Divine Narcissism; that is, to transmute self-love, which excludes love of others, into Self-love, which is love of others.”

— Ken Wilber

94. “Both the old and new physics were dealing with shadow-symbols, but the new physics was forced to be aware of that fact – forced to be aware that it was dealing with shadows and illusions, not reality.”

— Ken Wilber

95. “Nihilism and narcissism are not traits that any leading-edge can actually operate with.”

— Ken Wilber

96. “The Yoga of the Dream State has always held to be one of the fastest, most efficient ways of reaching a plateau experience of subtle and causal realms, thus quickly opening the door to stable adaptation at – and transcendence of – those realms.”

— Ken Wilber

97. “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

98. “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

99. “The adventure of awakening is among the most universal of human dramas.”

— Ken Wilber

100. “The beauty of practice is that it transforms us so that we outgrow our original intentions – and keep going! Our motivations for practicing evolve as we mature.”

— Ken Wilber