Ken Wilber Quotes

Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of mental illness, but of growing intelligence.

You cannot have exterior development without interior development to hold it in place.

Real love will take you far beyond yourself;and therefore real love will devastate you.

Be the most ethical, the most responsible, the most authentic you can be with every breath you take, because you are cutting a path into tomorrow that others will follow.

The truth will not necessarily set you free, but truthfulness will.

As Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin knew, the future of humankind is God-consciousness.

I rise to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today.

Boundary lines, of any type, are never found in the real world itself, but only in the imagination of the mapmakers.

The point is to unify the opposites, both positive and negative, by discovering a ground which transcends and encompasses both.

I don't believe that any human mind is capable of 100 percent error... Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.

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.

...we cannot simply recommend love and compassion per se, for those unfold from egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, and do we really want an increase in ethnocentric love?

The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.

In a special sense... the three great natural states of waking, dreaming, and deep sleep contain an entire spectrum of spiritual enlightenment.

I don't have to agree with everything you say, but I should attempt at least to understand it, for the opposite of mutual understanding is, quite simply, war.

Science is clearly one of the most profound methods that humans have yet devised for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning.

The basic idea of integral transformative practice (ITP) is simple: the more aspects of our being that we simultaneously exercise, the more likely that transformation will occur.

Let's not forget that what is looking out of your eyes and hearing with your ears right now is already Spirit. And that Spirit, that I AMness, is always present in all sentient beings.

In Democracy, man exploits man; in Communism, it's the other way round.

Increasing consciousness = increasing complexity.

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

Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend.

Eternity is not ever-lasting time but the real, unfading, indestructible, and timeless Present, for, as Schroedinger said, the present is the only thing that has no end.

To understand the whole it is necessary to understand the parts. To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole. Such is the circle of understanding.

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

Matter begins evolving back to Spirit and, when it's reached, the whole process begins over again for the billionth time.

You can't have good without evil, pleasure without pain, and so on.

Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences.

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

There is a way out, but the way out is really a way within.

I don't talk about consciousness. I talk about interiority.

AQAL is a map of samsara, a map of the prison, but if you gonna make a prison brake,you need a good map. (laughter)

There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other.

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.

Freedom is an endless meeting.

If you really want to change the world, you must first understand it adequately, or all you will do is reproduce in larger numbers your own ignorance.

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.

The single greatest world transformation would simply be the embrace of global reasonableness and pluralistic tolerance the global embrace of egoic-rationality (on the way to centauric vision-logic).

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.

Society forces you to conform.

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

The more I go into I, the more I fall out of I.

Most of us are only willing to call 5% of our present information into question any one point.

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.

I think I was a born scientist.

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.

There is nothing in the universe but matter.

The nondual universe of One Taste arises as a spontaneous gesture of your own true nature.

Religion is just coded spirituality.

And resting in the ocean, dipped into the sea, I find glimmers of One Taste everywhere.