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Favorite Quotes from Ken Wilber on Integral Vision

"The mystics ask you to take nothing on mere belief.  Rather, they give you a set of experiments to test in your own awareness and experience.  The laboratory is your own mind, the experiment is meditation." 

Grace and Grit

"Meditation, then, is not so much a part of this or that particular religion, but rather part of the universal spiritual culture of all humankind--an effort to bring awareness to bear on all aspects of life.  It is, in other words, part of what has been called the perennial philosophy." 

Grace and Grit

"A language possesses utility only insofar as it can construct conventional boundaries.  A language of no boundaries is no language at all, and thus the mystic who tries to speak logically and formally of unity consciousness is doomed to sound very paradoxical or contradictory.  The problem is that the structure of any language cannot grasp the nature of unity consciousness, any more than a fork could grasp the ocean." 

No Boundary

"The most striking feature of the perennial philosophy/psychology is that it presents being and consciousness as a hierarchy of dimensional levels, moving from the lowest, densest, and most fragmentary realms to the highest, subtlest, and most unitary ones." 

Eye to Eye

"Putting there three dimensions (I, we, and it; or art, morals, and science; or Beauty, Goodness, and Truth) together with the major levels of existence (matter, body, mind, soul, and spirit) would give us a much more genuinely integral or holistic approach to reality." 

One Taste

"In the Dzogchen tradition, if Spirit has any meaning, it must be omnipresent, or all-pervading and all-encompassing.  There can't be a place Spirit is not, or it wouldn't be infinite.  Therefore, Spirit has to be completely present, right here, right now, in your own awareness.  That is, your own present awareness, precisely as it is, without changing it or altering it in any way, is perfectly and completely permeated by Spirit….You are looking directly at Spirit, with Spirit, in every act of awareness.  There is nowhere Spirit is not." 

Grace and Grit

"There are four major stages of spiritual unfolding:  belief, faith, direct experience, and permanent adaptation:  you can believe in Spirit, you can have faith in Spirit, you can directly experience Spirit, you can become Spirit….Meditation is not primarily uncovering the repressed unconscious, but allowing the emergence of higher domains--which usually leaves the lower, repressed domains still lower, and still repressed….Well, the point, of course, is to take up integral practice as the only sound and balanced way to proceed….If you are interested in genuine transformative spirituality, find an authentic spiritual teacher and begin practice.  Without practice, you will never move beyond the phases of belief, faith, and random peak experiences.  You will never evolve into plateau experiences, nor from there into permanent adaptation.  You will remain, at best, a brief visitor in the territory of your own higher estate, a tourist of you own true Self." 

One Taste