Wilber
Ken Wilber is one of the greatest philosophers of this century and arguably one of the greatest theoretical psychologists of all time. Roger Walsh M.D. Ph.D.
Wilber is an American integral thinker and author. Working outside the academic mainstream, he has drawn on a variety of disciplines including psychology, sociology, philosophy, mysticism, post modernism, science and systems theory to formulate what he characterises as an Integral Theory of Consciousness. He is a leading proponent of the Integral thought movement, and founded the Integral Institute in 1998.
While Wilber has practiced Buddhist meditation methods, and the beliefs of Madhyamika Buddhism, particularly as articulated in the philosophy of Nagarjuna, Wilber does not identify himself as a Buddhist.
I first came across Wilber’s writing while in Thailand attending to my father who was injured in a high-speed car accident. Wilber is a prolific writer, and it was indirectly through his books that this site came to be. Some of my preferred titles are listed below.
No Boundary
Eastern and Western Approaches to Personal Growth
This book had particular relevance for me as I started exploring the differences between Eastern and Western cultures.
This, his second book, written nearly thirty years ago, confronts its reader with an important question, “Where are the edges of the self?” Our lives, he observes, are largely spent drawing boundaries (p. 18) between life and death, good and bad, pleasure and pain, heaven and hell, success and failure. We “live a life of opposites” (p. 16), and we are “bewitched by boundaries” (p. 25). But “the ultimate metaphysical secret,” Wilber writes, “is that there are no boundaries in the universe” (p. 30). Seeing through the illusion of opposites is liberation–”the discovery of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth” (p. 28).
This book is like a sign along the road, pointing the way toward enlightenment. In his examination of “our most cherished boundary” (p. 43), self/not-self, Wilber integrates psychology, philosophy, post-modern thought, and religious doctrine of East and West. He shows how “we progressively limit our world and turn from our true nature in order to embrace boundaries” (p. 3). We believe that our skin (p. 5), mind (p. 6), or ego (p. 7) separates us from our not-self when, in fact, we “possess a remarkable spectrum of consciousness, a vast rainbow of extraordinary potentials and possibilities, and those potentials do indeed run from matter to body to soul to spirit” (p. xii). Wilber recognizes that the ordinary person “will probably listen in disbelief if it is pointed out that she has nestled in the deepest recesses of her being, a transpersonal self, a self that transcends her individuality and connects her to a world beyond conventional space and time” (p. 110).
Saint Augustine wrote that the business of life “is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.” No Boundary may be read as a book about personal growth, restoring to health the eye of the heart, and “expanding one’s horizons, a growth of one’s boundaries, outwardly in perspective and inwardly in depth” (p. 13). Among other approaches, Wilber turns to the Buddhist doctrines of dharmadhatu, which teaches us “between every thing and event in the universe there is no boundary” (p. 38), and suffering. “A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life,” he writes, is “beginning to awaken to deeper realities, truer realities, for suffering smashes to pieces the complacency of our normal fictions about reality and forces us to become alive in a special sense–to see carefully, to feel deeply, to touch ourselves and our worlds in ways we have heretofore avoided. It may be said, and truly I think, that suffering is the first grace” (p. 76).
If we learn to “see through the illusions of our boundaries,” he writes, “we will see, here and now, the universe as Adam saw it before the Fall: as organic unity, a harmony of opposites, a melody of positive and negative, delight with the play of our vibrative existence. When the opposites are realized to be one, discord melts into concord, battles become dances, and old enemies become lovers. We are then in a position to make friends with all of the universe, and not just half of it” (p. 29). So where are the edges of the universe? After reading this book, I now realize that they exist only within the boundaries of my unliberated mind.
No Boundary is an excellent introduction to his integral vision.
A Theory of Everything
An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality
A Theory of Everything provides a thought-provoking introduction to Ken Wilber’s “integral vision”, a theory that attempts to integrate all things–science, religion, art, morals, physics, politics, medicine, education, ecology, sociology and business. Wilber observes that approximately 20 percent of the population is poised for “second-tier” integral transformation (p. 33), and that we are at “a branch point”: we can continue travelling the road of scientific materialism, fragmented pluralism, and deconstructive postmodernism, or we can pursue a more integral, more embracing, more inclusive path to travel (p. xiii). The book’s first four chapters introduce us to Wilber’s “Theory of Everything”, and the last three demonstrate the theory’s “real world” relevance. In the final chapter, Wilber reduces his theory to a personal level of “integral transformative practice.” Throughout the book, Wilber’s prose is conversational in tone.
Integral Spirituality
A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World
Integral Spirituality is a superb book. It situates the diverse elements of spirituality in a context that takes account of the insights of Post-Modernism/ Post-Structuralism. Wilber, consistent with his approach from the beginning, has argued that all serious, disciplined, approaches to “reality” have something to contribute to our understanding. Insights from the Pre-modern Great Chain, as well as perspectives from Post-Modernism, both have a significant contribution to make, particularly where their complementarity is acknowledged. However, as Wilber argues, methodologies, individual insights, as well as the objects under review, need to be situated within the perspectives of the AQAL matrix in order for their contribution to be appreciated and critiqued. In this work, Wilber gives numerous illustrations of how easy it is to be imprisoned by our myopia in the myth of the given, which are helpful and cautionary. He also deals, in greater detail, with the interrelationship of states and stages, including suggested ways in which the former can foster development in the latter. Ken’s suggestion that specific disciplines, or approaches, do not need to be dismissed, but situated and complemented by others, is helpful.
Integral Psychology
Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy
With this book Ken Wilber accomplishes something extraordinary. In lucid, lively, and often humorous writing, he presents a model of psychology and spirituality that, unlike anything before it, fully integrates–in a completely reasonable manner–every facet of serious mental and spiritual investigation ever devised.
Standing in the middle of a room called reality, Wilber sees four corners–the subjective (”I”), objective (”It”), intersubjective (”We”), and interobjective (”Its”)–and realizes the obvious: the world is not constructed as strictly “objective” and material, nor purely “subjective” and mental, nor the plurals of those, but somehow all of them at once. Reality has four corners to it (or, for simplicity’s sake, three dimensions: subjective, cultural, and objective; or I, We, and It; or first-person, second-person, and third-person aspects), and none of these corners can be simply “reduced” to, or derived from, any other. All four corners of reality arise together, along with a single universal room, and while they are indeed irreducible to each other, they are all mutually determining, inseparable, and incessantly interacting. Thus, standing in the middle of this Kosmic room, Wilber gives consciousness its due, permitting it to roam freely about the room and saving it, so to speak, from the immemorial punishment of standing in a particular corner while its parents decided what to do with their problematic child.
Truly, the utterly liberating sanity and clarity of this work cannot be overstated. From Aurobindo in the East to Piaget in the West, nearly every tenable analysis of the nature of consciousness adds a brick to this, the foundation of an edifice that, in coming years, can only help to restore meaning and sanity to the life of any self fortunate enough to walk its halls.
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality
The Spirit of Evolution
Among all of Wilber’s books, this is “The One” that really explains it all. What an inspiring piece of work! He brings together work in philosophy, spirituality, psychology, sociology, biology, physics and all other fields of study and convincingly explains that it all fits together if we look at it through this framework that he has developed. If there is a philosophical book you should read, this is the one to pick up.
A Brief History of Everything
This book was written as a summary of the work presented in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality and was intended for a more popular audience.
Wilber’s great contribution to world thought is as an integrator of a staggering breadth of philosophical thought, psychological research and accounts of mystical experience. He maintains that each of the wisdom traditions and methods of inquiry into human experience has at least some valid contribution to make. He then sets about the daunting task of finding the ground upon which they all can be said to agree and integrating them into a theoretical structure that can be used to understand how, though no single discipline can present the whole truth, all can deliver a piece of it. For example, it is not that neuroscience is right and mysticism is wrong or vice versa. They are both right but incomplete. There really are neurons that can be observed to behave in certain ways. But that is not, and cannot be, all there is to say about human experience. Wilber succeeds establishing an integral theory of consciousness that draws from the wisdom of all the traditions of inquiry to a greater extent than any other thinker I have read.
Full list of Wilber’s Books on Wikipedia
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