Wilber Quotes

What is the opposite of two? A lonely me and a lonely you.

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

I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.

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

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

Increasing consciousness = increasing complexity.

Man, the mask of God,

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.

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

And therefore, all of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout form the heart—perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakable public example—but authentically always and absolutely carries a a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you. Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate. You don’t want to upset others because you don’t want to upset your self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste of a bad infinity. Because, you see, the alarming fact is that any realization of depth carries a terrible burden: those who are allowed to see are simultaneously saddled with the obligation to communicate that vision in no uncertain terms: that is the bargain. You were allowed to see the truth under the agreement that you would communicate it to others (that is the ultimate meaning of the bodhisattva vow). And therefore, if you have seen, you simply must speak out. Speak out with compassion, or speak out with angry wisdom, or speak out with skillful means, but speak out you must. And this is truly a terrible burden, a horrible burden, because in any case there is no room for timidity. The fact that you might be wrong is simply no excuse: You might be right in your communication, and you might be wrong, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter, as Kierkegaard so rudely reminded us, is that only by investing and speaking your vision with passion, can the truth, one way or another, finally penetrate the reluctance of the world. If you are right, or if you are wrong, it is only your passion that will force either to be discovered. It is your duty to promote that discovery—either way—and therefore it is your duty to speak your truth with whatever passion and courage you can find in your heart. You must shout, in whatever way you can.

That all opposites—such as mass and energy, subject and object, life and death—are so much each other that they are perfectly inseparable, still strikes most of us as hard to believe. But this is only because we accept as real the boundary line between the opposites. It is, recall, the boundaries themselves which create the seeming existence of separate opposites. To put it plainly, to say that "ultimate reality is a unity of opposites" is actually to say that in ultimate reality there are no boundaries. Anywhere.

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

This present moment, since it knows neither past nor future, is itself timeless, and that which is timeless is Eternal. Thus “the eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

The simple fact is that we live in a world of conflict and opposites because we live in a world of boundaries. Since every boundary line is also a battle line, here is the human predicament: the firmer one’s boundaries, the more entrenched are one’s battles. The more I hold onto pleasure, the more I necessarily fear pain. The more I pursue goodness, the more I am obsessed with evil. The more I seek success, the more I must dread failure. The harder I cling to life, the more terrifying death becomes. The more I value anything, the more obsessed I become with its loss. Most of our problems, in other words, are problems of boundaries and the opposites they create.

Becoming a leader is the same as becoming a fully integrated human being,

If the soul wants to know God, it cannot do so in time. For so long as the soul is conscious of time or space or any other [object], it cannot know God.

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.

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

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.

Oh you would have loved him. My Wilber was all heart. And farts. That man couldn’t walk five steps without tooting.” She gave a soft giggle in memory. “I do miss that. Not the farts so much, just… the little things.

THE ULTIMATE METAPHYSICAL SECRET, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality. And while it is fine to map out the territory, it is fatal to confuse the two.

Because we demand a future, we live each moment in expectation and unfulfillment. We live each moment in passing. In just this way the real nunc stans, the timeless present, is reduced to the nunc fluens, the fleeting present, the passing present of a mere one or two seconds. We expect each moment to pass on to a future moment, for in this fashion we pretend to avoid death by always rushing toward an imagined future. We want to meet ourselves in the future. We don’t want just now—we want another now, and another, and another, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And thus, paradoxically, our impoverished present is fleeting precisely because we demand that it end! We want it to end so that it can thereby pass on to yet another moment, a future moment, which will in turn live only to pass.

Because the egoic mind has led us to feel separate from our immortal Ground of Being over the millennia, we have invented a number of immortality symbols to give us a precarious sense of security and identity in life. Traditionally, these have been religious in character, such as the belief in everlasting life after death, in the West, and the belief in reincarnation, in the East. However, today, it is money that provides the primary immortality symbol. It is our obsession for money that is driving humanity to extinction. For when we do not face our fears with full consciousness and intelligence, these fears will eventually come along to haunt us.

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.

In other words, this world is not a sin; forgetting that “this world” is the radiance and Goodness of Spirit—there is the sin.

To the extent that you actually realize that you are not, for example, your anxieties, then your anxieties no longer threaten you. Even if anxiety is present, it no longer overwhelms you because you are no longer exclusively tied to it. You are no longer courting it, fighting it, resisting it, or running from it. In the most radical fashion, anxiety is thoroughly accepted as it is and allowed to move as it will. You have nothing to lose, nothing to gain, by its presence or absence, for you are simply watching it pass by. Thus, any emotion, sensation, thought, memory, or experience that disturbs you is simply one with which you have exclusively identified yourself, and the ultimate resolution of the disturbance is simply to dis-identify with it. You cleanly let all of them drop away by realizing that they are not you--since you can see them, they cannot be the true Seer and Subject. Since they are not your real self, there is no reason whatsoever for you to identify with them, hold on to them, or allow your self to be bound by them. Slowly, gently, as you pursue this dis-identification "therapy," you may find that your entire individual self (persona, ego, centaur), which heretofore you have fought to defend and protect, begins to go transparent and drop away. Not that it literally falls off and you find yourself floating, disembodied, through space. Rather, you begin to feel that what happens to your personal self—your wishes, hopes, desires, hurts—is not a matter of life-or-death seriousness, because there is within you a deeper and more basic self which is not touched by these peripheral fluctuations, these surface waves of grand commotion but feeble substance. Thus, your personal mind-and-body may be in pain, or humiliation, or fear, but as long as you abide as the witness of these affairs, as if from on high, they no longer threaten you, and thus you are no longer moved to manipulate them, wrestle with them, or subdue them. Because you are willing to witness them, to look at them impartially, you are able to transcend them. As St. Thomas put it, "Whatever knows certain things cannot have any of them in its own nature." Thus, if the eye were colored red, it wouldn't be able to perceive red objects. It can see red because it is clear, or "redless." Likewise, if we can but watch or witness our distresses, we prove ourselves thereby to be "distress-less," free of the witnessed turmoil. That within which feels pain is itself pain-less; that which feels fear is fear-less; that which perceives tension is tensionless. To witness these states is to transcend them. They no longer seize you from behind because you look at them up front.

Like Yeshua, James is against the idea that we can just pick and choose which commandments are relevant to our lives. We have no authority to declare some commandments valid and others invalid. All of the Torah is important.

When most people are happy, it’s not really fun until you can share it with someone, especially someone you love, a mate or a friend.

Sometime the witch hunting takes on atrocious dimensions — the Nazi persecution of Jews, the Salem witch trials, the Ku Klux Klan scapegoating of blacks. Notice, however, that in all such cases the persecutor hates the persecuted for precisely those traits that the persecutor displays with a glaringly uncivilized fury. At other times, the witch hunt appears in less terrifying proportions—the cold war fear of a "Commie under every bed," for instance. And often, it appears in comic form—the interminable gossip about everybody else that tells you much more about the gossiper than about the object of gossip. But all of these are instances of individuals desperate to prove that their own shadows belong to other people. Many men and women will launch into tirades about how disgusting homosexuals are. Despite how decent and rational they otherwise try to behave, they find themselves seized with a loathing of any homosexual, and in an emotional outrage will advocate such things as suspending gay civil rights (or worse). But why does such an individual hate homosexuals so passionately? Oddly, he doesn’t hate the homosexual because he is homosexual; he hates him because he sees in the homosexual what he secretly fears he himself might become. He is most uncomfortable with his own natural, unavoidable, but minor homosexual tendencies, and so projects them. He thus comes to hate the homosexual inclinations in other people—but only because he first hates them in himself. And so, in one form or another, the witch hunt goes. We hate people "because," we say, they are dirty, stupid, perverted, immoral.... They might be exactly what we say they are. Or they might not. That is totally irrelevent, however, because we hate them only if we ourselves unknowingly possess the despised traits ascribed to them. We hate them because they are a constant reminder of aspects of ourselves that we are loathe to admit. We are starting to see an important indicator of projection. Those items in the environment (people or things) that strongly affect us instead of just informing us are usually our own projections. Items that bother us, upset us, repulse us, or at the other extreme, attract us, compel us, obsess us—these are usually reflections of the shadow. As an old proverb has it, I looked, and looked, and this I came to see: That what I thought was you and you, Was really me and me.

Anything which is just born, which has just come into existence, has no past behind it. Birth, in other words, is the condition of having no past. And likewise, anything which now dies, which has just ceased to be, has no future left in front of it. Death is the condition of having no future. But we have already seen that this present moment has both no past and no future simultaneously. That is, birth and death are one in this present moment. This moment is just now being born—you can never find a past to this present moment, you can never find something before it. Yet also, this moment is just now dying — you can never find a future to this moment, never find something after it. This present, then, is a coincidence of opposites, a unity of birth and death, being and non-being, living and dying. As Ippen put it, "Every moment is the last moment and every moment is a rebirth.

Todo sucede como si de un modo deliberado nos estuvièramos pelliscando dolorosamente a nosotros mismos y pretendièramos, al mismo tiempo, que no es asì.

the Many returning to and embracing the One is Good, and is known as wisdom; the One returning to and embracing the Many is Goodness, and is known as compassion.

The cure for the disaster of modernity is to address the dissociation, not attempt to erase the differentiation!

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

God expresses His will to us through His written word. Do we truly believe that? Because to say, “This commandment is irrelevant,” is to say, “God’s will for my life in this area isn’t important to me.” God is the one who makes the rules, not us.

Anytime a sage displays humanness—in regard to money, food, sex, relationships—we are shocked, shocked, because we are planning to escape life altogether, not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us.

God did not intend the Sabbath to be a burden, but rather a time of joy. The Bible says that blessings come when we honor the Sabbath and call it a delight (Isaiah 58:13). Yeshua said the Sabbath was made for our benefit (Mark 2:27). So enjoy it and give thanks to God for giving us rest.

My simple explanation of why we human beings, the most advanced species on earth, cannot find happiness, is this: as we evolve up the ladder of being, we find three things: the first, that the tension between the range of opposites in our lives and society widens dramatically and often painfully as we evolve; the second, that the better informed and more intelligent we are, the more humble we have to become about our ability to live meaningful lives and to change anything, even ourselves; and consequently, thirdly, that the cost of gaining the simplicity the other side of complexity can rise very steeply if we do not align ourselves and our lives well.

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.

The movement of descent and discovery begins at the moment you consciously become dissatisfied with life. Contrary to most professional opinion, this gnawing dissatisfaction with life is not a sign of "mental illness," nor an indication of poor social adjustment, nor a character disorder. For concealed within this basic unhappiness with life and existence is the embryo of a growing intelligence, a special intelligence usually buried under the immense weight of social shams. A person who is beginning to sense the suffering of life is, at the same time, 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 has been said, and truly I think, that suffering is the first grace. In a special sense, suffering is almost a time of rejoicing, for it marks the birth of creative insight. But only in a special sense. Some people cling to their suffering as a mother to its child, carrying it as a burden they dare not set down. They do not face suffering with awareness, but rather clutch at their suffering, secretly transfixed with the spasms of martyrdom. Suffering should neither be denied awareness, avoided, despised, not glorified, clung to, dramatized. The emergence of suffering is not so much good as it is a good sign, an indication that one is starting to realize that life lived outside unity consciousness is ultimately painful, distressing, and sorrowful. The life of boundaries is a life of battles—of fear, anxiety, pain, and finally death. It is only through all manner of numbing compensations, distractions, and enchantments that we agree not to question our illusory boundaries, the root cause of the endless wheel of agony. But sooner or later, if we are not rendered totally insensitive, our defensive compensations begin to fail their soothing and concealing purpose. As a consequence, we begin to suffer in one way or another, because our awareness is finally directed toward the conflict-ridden nature of our false boundaries and the fragmented life supported by them.

Put this all a different way, and perhaps the importance of this fact will become clear: the very key to your growth, development, and evolution is to make your present subject an object—that is, it is to look at your present subject instead of using it as something through which to view the world (and thus remain identified with).

As Wittgenstein said, “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

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

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.

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

Writers and magicians do essentially the same thing, they create worlds with words and will.

Thus, to see all memory as present experience is to collapse the boundaries of this present moment, to free it of illusory limits, to deliver it from the opposites of past vs. future. It becomes obvious that there is nothing behind you in time nor before you in time. You thus have nowhere to stand but in the timeless present, and thus nowhere to stand but in eternity.

authenticity always and absolutely carries a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you.

Truth is abortion's biggest enemy. That's why no defender of abortion actually defends abortion. They defend "reproductive rights" and "women's healthcare," which are deceptive euphemisms for what they're actually defending: the murder of baby humans. The reason is, deep down, everyone knows that abortion is murder, so the only way to defend such an obviously evil act is by distracting themselves and others from the reality of it.

As simple as that sounds, it is nevertheless extremely difficult to adequately discuss no-boundary awareness or nondual consciousness. This is because our language — the medium in which all verbal discussion must float — is a language of boundaries. As we have seen, words and symbols and thoughts themselves are actually nothing but boundaries, for whenever you think or use a word or name, you are already creating boundaries. Even to say "reality is no-boundary awareness" is still to create a distinction between boundaries and no-boundary! So we have to keep in mind the great difficulty involved with dualistic language. That "reality is no-boundary" is true enough, provided we remember that no-boundary awareness is a direct, immediate, and nonverbal awareness, and not a mere philosophical theory. It is for these reasons that the mystic-sages stress that reality lies beyond names and forms, words and thoughts, divisions and boundaries. Beyond all boundaries lies the real world of Suchness, the Void, the Dharmakaya, Tao, Brahman, the Godhead. And in the world of suchness, there is neither good nor bad, saint nor sinner, birth nor death, for in the world of suchness there are no boundaries.

The postmodern poststructuralists go from saying “there is no final perspective” (or “perspectives are boundless”) to saying “therefore there is no advantage in any perspective over another.” This leveling of perspectives is not an interrelation of all perspectives but is itself merely one particular and covertly privileged perspective (and thus ends up, as we have seen, being perfectly self-contradictory: there is no advantaged perspective except mine, which maintains that all other perspectives are not so privileged).

A day will come when God will set everything right and wipe the tears from our eyes, and in that day death will be no more. But in the meantime, we can take comfort in the fact that God understands our pain. In our moments of immense grief and heartache, God is weeping with us. Scripture says that the Lord is near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18). He has a special place in His heart for hurting people. Therefore, far from being pointless, suffering is an opportunity to worship God and experience His loving presence in a deep and profound way.

The culture was constantly telling us one thing, and the realities of society were consistently failing to deliver it—the culture was lying. This was a deep and serious legitimation crisis: a culture that is consistently lying to its members simply cannot move forward for long.

I have a body, but I am not my body. I can see and feel my body, and what can be seen and felt is not the true Seer. My body may be tired or excited, sick or healthy, heavy or light, but that has nothing to do with my inward I. I have a body, but I am not my body. I have desires, but I am not my desires. I can know my desires, and what can be known is not the true Knower. Desires come and go, floating through my awareness, but they do not affect my inward I. I have desires but I am not desires. I have emotions, but I am not my emotions. I can feel and sense my emotions, and what can be felt and sensed is not the true Feeler. Emotions pass through me, but they do not affect my inward I. I have emotions but I am not emotions. I have thoughts, but I am not my thoughts. I can know and intuit my thoughts, and what can be known is not the true Knower. Thoughts come to me and thoughts leave me, but they do not affect my inward I. I have thoughts but I am not my thoughts.

The whole game is undone, this nightmare of evolution, and you are exactly where you were prior to the beginning of the whole show. With a sudden shock of the utterly obvious, you recognize your own Original Face, the face you had prior to the Big Bang, the face of utter Emptiness that smiles as all creation and sings as the entire Kosmos—and it is all undone in that primal glance, and all that is left is the smile, and the reflection of the moon on a quiet pond, late on a crystal clear night.

We must not become so overly obsessed with the minute details of the Torah that we neglect the more important parts. However, we also must not say that the “less important” parts of the Torah aren’t important at all. God forbid! While we certainly must emphasize the weightier matters of the Torah, at the same time we must not invalidate the lighter matters

continuously horrific hell permeated by a constantly perfect heaven.

That is, my experience is that when the bodymind is strong and healthy—not ascetically starved and despised—it is all the easier to drop it, transcend it, let it go.

the hand of death touches every love that the Descenders profess for all and sundry, tears also streaming down the face with “compassion” written all over it.

This profoundly disturbed me, because I had had several kensho or satori-like experiences (glimpses of One Taste), but they were all generally confined to the waking state.

I saw only the glory of green emeralds, and radiant buddhas walking everywhere, and there was no I to see any of this, but the emeralds were there just the same.

Yeshua gives the definitive interpretation of the Torah, a Torah observance guided by love and compassion.

ALL you are actually ever aware of is this timeless Now.

God is more concerned about your character than your comfort.

Many of us don't experience God because we've grown lazy and bored. We expect to receive the benefits of Religion without putting anything into it.

God takes our thankfulness very seriously. When we give thanks, we honor Him. And the opposite is also true. When we do not give thanks—when we are ungrateful—we dishonor Him.

As Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, put it, “There is no more dangerous illusion than the fancies by which people try to avoid illusion.

At the transpersonal level, we begin to love others not because they love us, affirm us, reflect us, or secure us in our illusions, but because they are us. Christ’s primary teaching does not mean, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself,” but “Love your neighbor as your Self.” And not just your neighbor, but your whole environment. You begin to care for your surroundings just as you would your own arms and legs. At this level, remember, your relationship to your environment is the same as your relationship to your very own organism. At

Mark 2:27 states that the Sabbath was established in creation to benefit all mankind. The Sabbath was not given exclusively to Israel but was instituted before there even was an Israel.

Wilber, why do they call me a ferret?” Wilberforce pushed his foggy glasses higher on his narrow nose. “Because a ferret is a rabbit, you see.” “How,” asked Addison as patiently as he could, “is a ferret a rabbit?” “In cricket they’re much the same thing. A rabbit is someone who scores zero points. And in cricket, zero points is called a duck.” “So a ferret is a rabbit with a duck.

We’re in the same position as any scientist. All we have to go on is experiential evidence. And sooner or later we have to trust our own experience, because that’s all we really have. Otherwise it’s a vicious circle. If I fundamentally distrust my experience, then I must distrust even my capacity to distrust, since that is also an experience. So sooner or later I have no choice but to trust, trust my experience, trust that the universe is not fundamentally and persistently going to lie to me. Of course we can be mistaken, and sometimes experiences are misleading, but on balance we have no choice but to follow them. It’s a type of phenomenological imperative. And especially mystical experiences—if anything, as you say, they are more real, not less real, than other experiences.” I

It marshals a vast amount of scientific evidence, from physics to biology, and offers extensive arguments, all geared to objectively proving the holistic nature of the universe. It fails to see that if we take a bunch of egos with atomistic concepts and teach them that the universe is holistic, all we will actually get is a bunch of egos with holistic concepts. Precisely because this monological approach, with its unskillful interpretation of an otherwise genuine intuition, ignores or neglects the “I” and the “we” dimensions, it doesn’t understand very well the exact nature of the inner transformations that are necessary in the first place in order to be able to find an identity that embraces the manifest All. Talk about the All as much as we want, nothing fundamentally changes.

The difference between supermind and Big Mind (if we take Big Mind to mean the state experience of nondual Suchness, or turiyatita) is that Big Mind can be experienced or recognized at virtually any lower level or rung. Magic to Integral. In fact, one can be at, say, the Pluralistic stage, and experience several core characteristics of the entire sequence of state-stages (gross to subtle to causal to Witnessing to Nondual), although, of course, the entire sequence, including nondual Suchness, will be interpreted in Pluralistic terms. This is unfortunate in many ways—interpreting Dharma in merely Pluralistic terms (or Mythic terms, or Rational, and so on)—because it is so ultimately reductionistic; but it happens all the time, given the relative independence of states and structures at 1st and 2nd tier. Supermind, on the other hand, as a basic structure-rung (conjoined with nondual Suchness) can only be experienced once all the previous junior levels have emerged and developed, and as in all structure development, stages cannot be skipped. Therefore, unlike Big Mind, supermind can only be experienced after all 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-tier junior stages have been passed through. While, as Genpo Roshi has abundantly demonstrated, Big Mind state experience is available to virtually anybody at almost any age (and will be interpreted according to the View of their current stage), supermind is an extremely rare recognition. Supermind, as the highest structure-rung to date, has access to all previous structures, all the way back to Archaic—and the Archaic itself, of course, has transcended and included, and now embraces, every major structural evolution going all the way back to the Big Bang. (A human being literally enfolds and embraces all the major transformative unfoldings of the entire Kosmic history—strings to quarks to subatomic particles to atoms to molecules to cells, all the way through the Tree of Life up to its latest evolutionary emergent, the triune brain, the most complex structure in the known natural world.) Supermind, in any given individual, is experienced as a type of “omniscience”—the supermind, since it transcends and includes all of the previous structure-rungs, and inherently is conjoined with the highest nondual Suchness state, has a full and complete knowledge of all of the potentials in that person. It literally “knows all,” at least for the individual.

Proper Torah observance must flow from a heart of love for our neighbor. If we claim to be Torah observant but neglect matters of justice, mercy, and faithfulness, then we are not truly Torah observant.

And gone the Godless destiny of death and desperation, and gone the madness of a life committed to uncare, and gone the tears and terror of the brutal days and endless nights where time alone would rule.

This pure I AM state is not hard to achieve and impossible to escape.... You can never run from Spirit, because Spirit is the runner... Why on earth do you keep looking for God when God is actually the looker?

According to the Messiah, the Sabbath is a joyful day to glorify God by doing good (e.g., Matthew 12:9-13). Yeshua doesn’t do away with the Sabbath; he “fulfills” it by demonstrating how to observe it properly.

The Prophets cite Israel’s breaking of the Sabbath as one of the reasons that God brought judgment upon them (Jeremiah 17:19-27; Ezekiel 20) while keeping the Sabbath is said to bring blessing (Isaiah 58:13-14).

As Harvard developmental psychologist Howard Gardner reminds us, The young child is totally egocentric—meaning not that he thinks selfishly only about himself, but to the contrary, that he is incapable of thinking about himself. The egocentric child is unable to differentiate himself from the rest of the world; he has not separated himself out from others or from objects. Thus he feels that others share his pain or his pleasure, that his mumblings will inevitably be understood, that his perspective is shared by all persons, that even animals and plants partake of his consciousness. In playing hide-and-seek he will “hide” in broad view of other persons, because his egocentrism prevents him from recognizing that others are aware of his location. The whole course of human development can be viewed as a continuing decline in egocentrism.2

Imagine a husband treating his wife the way many Christians in America treat God. He says he loves her but ignores her for most of their marriage. He isn’t devoted to her and doesn’t actively pursue her daily—is that really love? Can you really call such a relationship a “marriage”? Technically, yes, but not in any meaningful way. It would be a marriage in name only. The same is true of Christians whose lives are not devoted to their Messiah.

Cornellisen charged Jung for daring to take credit for discovering the 'collective unconscious' which is simply a misnomer and a poor conceptualisation of inner worlds known since millennia in India and even the mystical traditions of Europe

For many people, apologetics is one of the biggest things that God has used to strengthen their faith and help them grow in their relationship with Him. Learning about the various ways that science, history, and philosophy cohere with God and how apparent conflicts can be resolved is exciting and edifying. Like Jacob struggling with God and refusing to let go until God blessed him, apologetics allows us to struggle with God over the deep philosophical and theological questions of our time. There’s a blessing for us in that struggle!

The only way I could discover how to help someone was by listening. Only when I heard what they were trying to say could I get a sense of what they needed, of the issues they were confronting at that time, of the kind of help that would really help at that specific moment.

...the capacity to identify with others is definitely not gained all at once or from the start. The mind has to increase its capacity for inclusiveness through a slow and arduous growth process, and thus this capacity gets a little bigger (moving from egocentric to ethnocentric—from "me" to "us"), then a little bigger (from ethnocentric to worldcentric—from "us" to "all of us"), and a little bigger still (from worldcentric to integral, which starts to include even other species, resulting eventually in a "cosmic consciousness"—from "all of us" to "all of reality).

If you think this ethnocentric stage—with its tendencies toward racism, sexism/patriarchy, misogyny, mega-tribal dominance, oppression, and fundamentalist religion—sounds a bit like hardcore far-Right Republicans, and that it starts to push into recognized Trump territory, you’d be right.

Although one of the points of an Integral approach to any problem is to language that issue in a s large a number of levels as possible (Magic, Mythic, Rational, Pluralistic, Integral, and Super-Integral—and this includes the “conveyor belt” of spirituality), this doesn’t mean to cavalierly overlook Integral itself. The Integral level is a prerequisite for “Integral We” practices (although anybody can be invited to those practices; but realize that an “Integral” depth of the “We” will not be achieved in any group the majority of whose individuals are not themselves at Integral).

where evidence is erased, narcissism flourishes. The demand for evidence—or validity claims—which has always anchored genuine and progressive science, simply means that one’s own ego cannot impose on the universe a view of reality that finds no support from the universe itself. The validity claims and evidence are the ways in which we attune ourselves to the Kosmos. The validity claims force us to confront reality; they curb our egoic fantasies and self-centered ways; they demand evidence from the rest of the Kosmos; they force us outside of ourselves! They are the checks and balances in the Kosmic Constitution.

As we said, Zen masters talk about Emptiness all the time! But they have a practice and a methodology (zazen) which allows them to discover the transcendental referent via their own developmental signified, and thus their words (the signifiers) remain grounded in experiential, reproducible, fallibilist criteria.

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.

El dios, o la diosa, del capitalismo, del marxismo, del industrialismo, de la ecología profunda, del consumismo o del ecofeminismo es el dios de lo que puede verse con los ojos, percibirse con los sentidos, registrarse con los sentimientos o venerarse con las sensaciones, un dios al que puede hincarse el diente y que se agota en las formas.

When we love a person, we love all that belongs to him; we extend to the children the affection we feel for the parent. Now every Soul is a daughter of the [Godhead]. How can this world be separated from the spiritual world? Those who despise what is so nearly akin to the spiritual world, prove that they know nothing of the spiritual world, except in name. .

Thought is sequential, successive, one-dimensional, while the real world presents itself as a multidimensional, non-successive, simultaneous pattern of infinite richness and variety; and trying to make the one grasp the other is like trying to appreciate a beautiful landscape by looking through a narrow slit in a fence or trying to take in a Renoir painting by microscope alone.

An integral approach is based on one basic idea: no human mind can be 100% wrong. Or, we might say, nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time. And that means, when it comes to deciding which approaches, methodologies, epistemologies, or ways or knowing are "correct," the answer can only be, "All of them." That is, all of the numerous practices or paradigms of human inquiry — including physics, chemistry, hermeneutics, collaborative inquiry, meditation, neuroscience, vision quest, phenomenology, structuralism, subtle energy research, systems theory, shamanic voyaging, chaos theory, developmental psychology—all of those modes of inquiry have an important piece of the overall puzzle of a total existence that includes, among other many things, health and illness, doctors and patients, sickness and healing.

There is a phrase for this that has become quite common: “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Polls show that some 20 percent of Americans identify overall with that phrase. And some polls have shown that, in the younger generation—those between eighteen and twenty-nine—this percentage explodes to an astonishing 75 percent!2 In other words, three out of four young individuals have a deep spiritual yearning that no existing religion is addressing.

Fame in this country is a religion that demands human sacrifice, a religion to which I do not wish to belong. You start to take yourself so seriously—I saw it happening to me, after I had written my first book at the age of 23. I’d give lectures or seminars, people would tell me how amazingly great I was, and sooner or later, you believe them. You end up exactly with what Oscar Levant said to George Gershwin: “Tell me, George, if you had it to do all over again, would you still fall in love with yourself?” After

For you soon learn that there are some things that simply should not be discussed with the loved one; and conversely, there are some things the loved one ought not discuss with you. I think most of my generation believes that “honesty is the best policy” and that spouses should discuss every single thing that bothers them with the other spouse. Bad plan. Openness is important and helpful, but only so far. At some point, openness can become a weapon, a spiteful way to hurt someone—“But I was only telling the truth.

It is possible to remake this world because you - the very deepest you - are its one and only Author, its sole Creator. But it - you - are not alone, because the deepest Self of this deepest you is looking out through the eyes of every sentient being alive, including all 9 billion humans on the planet. You can remake the world because you possess 18 billion hands, more than enough to reshape and refigure all that needs to be done. Feel the unimaginable creative power of this one and only I AMness, and know that anything is possible.

It is, of course, simply another name for narcissism. Whatever my problems, they do not stem from me. They stem from the Other, who is the Bad Guy always. The real travesty here is that the cases of true oppression—a genuine case of a woman, a gay, a black, an Indian, a white male, getting held back due solely to ethnocentric or group prejudice—those cases lose all their urgency because they are drowned out by a thousand other voices all screaming oppression to explain even the most trivial and often unavoidable disappointments of life. So

And scholars of the mystical, or esoteric, or inner teachings of the world’s Great Traditions are fairly unanimous in saying that although the outer teachings of each tradition are considerably different, often even contradictory, the inner esoteric teachings, the teachings based not on beliefs but on direct spiritual experiences of Waking Up, show a remarkable similarity in what they say, which is why the mystics of virtually all the world’s religions have great ease in understanding each other, even as their exoteric brethren argue themselves silly.

In Mahayana Buddhism the universe is therefore likened to a vast net of jewels, wherein the reflection from one jewel is contained in all jewels, and the reflections of all are contained in each. As the Buddhists put it, “All in one and one in all.” This sounds very mystical and far-out, until you hear a modern physicist explain the present-day view of elementary particles: “This states, in ordinary language, that each particle consists of all the other particles, each of which is in the same way and at the same time all other particles together.” Similarities

A Super-Integral Spirituality has all the features of an Integral Spirituality, plus, among other things, an inherent conjunction of each stage with a given state, giving all of its stages a transpersonal or spiritual flavor (at least the possibility of either gross nature mysticism, subtle deity mysticism, causal formless mysticism, or nondual Unity mysticism). These mystical states are, of course, available to virtually all the lower 1st- and 2nd-tier stages, although there are likely some significant differences in 3rd tier, given its inherent conjunction of structures and states.

One is the “Big Mind Process” developed by Genpo Dennis Merzel Roshi, a senior dharma successor of Maezumi Roshi. Based in part on the Stones’ Voice Dialogue Technique, Big Mind engages the practitioner in a series of dialogue investigations of various types of self—from the controller to the seeker to the wounded child to the protector. The dialogue simply proceeds with things like, “Let me speak to the controller,” the teacher requests. “Who are you?” “I’m the controller,” the student responds, as the controlling self comes to the fore. “What is your goal? What do you do? How do you operate?

Since nobody knows what caused your cancer, I don’t know what you should change in order to help cure it. So why don’t you try this. Why don’t you use cancer as a metaphor and a spur to change all those things in your life that you wanted to change anyway. In other words, repressing certain emotions may or may not have helped cause the cancer, but since you want to stop repressing those emotions anyway, then use the cancer as a reason, as an excuse, to do so. I know advice is cheap here, but why not take the cancer as an opportunity to change all those things on your list that can be changed?” The

this regard, a hotly disputed topic is whether the spiritual/transpersonal stages themselves can be conceived as higher levels of cognitive development. The answer, I have suggested, depends on what you mean by “cognitive.” If you mean what most Western psychologists mean—which is a mental conceptual knowledge of exterior objects—then no, higher or spiritual stages are not mental cognition, because they are often supramental, transconceptual, and nonexterior. If by “cognitive” you mean “consciousness in general,” including superconscious states, then much of higher spiritual experience is indeed cognitive.

Ingredients 2–3 cans dark red kidney beans (drained) 2 stalks celery, chopped 2 onions, chopped 2 green peppers, chopped 2–3 T olive oil 1 28-oz. can whole tomatoes 3–4 cloves garlic 3–4 T chili powder 1–2 T cumin 2–3 T fresh parsley 2–3 T oregano 1 can beer 1 cup cashews 1/2 cup raisins (optional) Heat oil in large pot; sauté onions until clear, then add celery, green pepper, and garlic; cook for 5 minutes or so. Add tomatoes (with juice; break the tomatoes into small chunks) and kidney beans; reduce to simmer. Add chili powder, cumin, parsley, oregano, beer, cashews, and raisins (opt.). Simmer as long as you want. Garnish with fresh parsley or grated cheddar cheese.

As events developed, the debate about jobs and energy extraction in general became more divisive. Those at one extreme embraced the industry as an expression of old-fashioned free enterprise. It offered work that built character and brought deserving rewards for those with initiative, whether they be roughnecks working twelve-hour shifts, investors staking their capital, or researchers staking their reputation on the next big discovery. At the other end of the spectrum were those who saw the industry as a relic of grandfather clauses and cronyism that dated to a period of predatory exploitation, when fantastical deals were pitched by door-to-door peddlers, manufacturing waste was buried in lagoons on private property, and unions were nonexistent. The middle ground was occupied by an untold number of consumers used to cheap plentiful energy, and property owners, who had their worries but also were able to calculate how much a mineral rights lease might be worth.

One function of Christian faith, for instance, is to offer believers a new way to translate their hardships. “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” In these beatitudes, spiritual poverty and grief are moved from the “loss” side of the ledger to the “gain” side, enabling those who suffer to view their hardships as blessings. This is the function of religion that sells books and grows churches, Wilber says, because it strengthens the believer’s sense of self, holding out the promise of contentment to anyone who can live by this new translation. In this mode, religion offers hope that the self may be saved. But translation is not the only function of religion. The second function, which Wilber calls transformation, exists not to comfort the self but to dismantle it. “Those who find their life will lose it,” Jesus says later in Matthew’s Gospel, “and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” The Greek word for “life” in this passage is psyche: the human breath, life, or soul. While Greek has no word for “ego” (a word that did not exist in any language before the early nineteenth century), psyche comes close. The salvation of the psyche begins with its own demise. This function of religion does not sell well, Wilber says, because it does not locate the human problem in the spiritual shortfall of the world. It locates the problem in the spiritual grasping of the self, which is always looking for ways to improve its own position. In popular American usage, Wilber says, “soul” has come to mean little more than “the ego in drag,” and much of what passes for spiritual teaching in this country is about consoling the self, not losing it. Translation is being marketed as transformation, which is why those who try to live on the spiritual equivalent of fast food have to keep going back for more and more. There is no filling a hole that was never designed to be filled, but only to be entered into. Where real transformation is concerned, Wilber says, “the self is not made content; the self is made toast.”4

With a sudden shock of the utterly obvious, you recognize your own Original Face, the face you had prior to the Big Bang, the face of utter Emptiness that smiles as all creation and sings as the entire Kosmos—and it is all undone in that primal glance, and all that is left is the smile, and the reflection of the moon on a quiet pond, late on a crystal clear night.

One has to die to the separate self in oder to find the universal Self or God […] as the mystics everywhere have repeatedly told us, it is only in accepting death that real life is found. (A Universe within, p. 79)

dialectic of progress at every turn—hardly a sweetness-and-light affair! Holons not only have an inside and outside, they also exist as individuals and as collectives. This means that every holon has four facets, which we called the four quadrants: intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social

With Spirit’s shocking Self-recognition, Forms continue to arise and evolve, but the secret is out: they are all Forms of Emptiness in the universe of One Taste, endlessly transparent and utterly Divine. There is no end limit, no foundation, no final resting place, only Emptiness and endless Grace. So the luminous Play carries on with insanely joyous regard, timeless gesture to timeless gesture, radiant in its wild release, ecstatic in its perfect abandon, endless fullness beyond endless fullness, this miraculously self-liberating Dance, and there is no one anywhere to watch it, or even sing its praises.

various types of meditation often aim for different transpersonal realms. Some aim for psychic experiences, some for the deity mysticism of the subtle realm, some for the formlessness and Freedom of the causal Witness, and some for nondual Unity or One Taste,

Even science itself was held to be no more true than poetry. (Seriously.) There simply was no difference between fact and fiction, news and novels, data and fantasies. In short, there was “no truth” anywhere.

In one sense—and this sounds a little hyper-sentimental—but from one angle almost every moment strikes me that way—the sheer Mystery of existence itself, the sheer and ultimate unknowability of everything, makes every moment a “holy-shit-how-did-this-happen?” moment. I’m certainly known as a philosopher, but what really strikes me the most is not the knowability of each moment, but the sheer unknowability of each moment—the magical Mystery tour of our entire trajectory—it’s awesome, amazing, unbelievable, miraculous, and completely unknowable in the last analysis—what the Christian mystics call “divine ignorance” and Zen calls “don’t-know mind”—those words are applying to the ultimate Reality! An integral approach is not a way to know it all, but to try to include in what we know as much as is humanly possible, because the only way to know anything about this ultimate Mystery is to know as much as we humanly can—the less we leave out, the more Mystery we embrace. It’s like Socrates is credited with saying: the more you know, the more unknowable you realize it all is (Socrates was said to be the wisest man alive because he realized he knew nothing at all). So every moment is a type of “holy-shit!” moment—that anything is happening at all is just miraculous, totally holy-shit miraculous.

The idea was that the brain is part of nature, nature alone is real, so consciousness can be found in an empirical study of the brain—this is a horrible reduction to monological surfaces.

The ladder is much higher than the climber, who remains committed to the lower rungs. It’s one thing to tap into a higher level; quite another to actually live there! And the same thing can happen with spiritual experiences. People can temporarily access some very high rungs in the ladder or circle of awareness, but they refuse to actually live from those levels—they won’t actually climb up there. Their center of gravity remains quite low, even debased

And if they are to live up to their spiritual experiences, then they will have to grow and develop. They will have to start the developmental unfolding, the holarchical expansion, the actual inhabiting of the expanding spheres of consciousness. Their center of gravity has to shift—to transform—to these deeper or higher spheres of consciousness; it does no good to merely “idealize” them in theoretical chit-chat and talking religion

When you step off the ladder altogether, you are in free fall in Emptiness. Inside and outside, subject and object, lose all ultimate meaning. You are no longer “in here” looking at the world “out there.” You are not looking at the Kosmos, you are the Kosmos. The universe of One Taste announces itself, bright and obvious, radiant and clear, with nothing outside, nothing inside, an unending gesture of great perfection, spontaneously accomplished. The very Divine sparkles in every sight and sound, and you are simply that.

They dramatically overidealize this primitive lack of differentiation. Just because the self is not aware of suffering does not mean it has a positive presence of spiritual bliss. Lack of awareness doesn’t mean presence of paradise!

Wisdom sees that the Many is One, and Compassion sees that the One is the Many. Or in the East: Prajna sees that Form is Emptiness, Karuna sees that Emptiness is Form.

The mythic god is the god of a particular peoples—it is sociocentric and ethnocentric, not postconventional and worldcentric

Left-Hand or interior events cannot be seen in that fashion. You cannot see love, envy, wonder, compassion, insight, intentionality, spiritual illumination, states of consciousness, value, or meaning running around out there in the empirical world. Interior events are not seen in an exterior or objective manner, they are seen by introspection and interpretation

Said the physicist Eddington: “We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last, we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! it is our own.” This is not to say that the real world

Enjoy your trip on the…what are the Boundary Waters? Is it that dotted line across Lake Superior? —A newspaper editor in Texas wishing the author a good trip

(This is also why an astonishing 20 percent of the population of the United States identifies with the phrase “I’m spiritual but not religious.” “Spiritual” almost always means some form of direct, 1st-person, immediate, authentic spiritual experience; and “religious” almost always means the standard, institutional, mythic-membership, fundamentalist version of “religion.” One poll, reported in the New Monasticism, showed an astonishing 75 percent of Millennials identified with that phrase. These are truths that are increasingly seeping into the culture at large, and all religions, sooner or later, will be forced to confront these very real issues.)

In the United States, for example, almost 60 percent of the population today is “churched”—hence likely at a Mythic or lower level (correlatively, Robert Kegan, in In Over Our Heads, estimates that 3 out of 5 Americans, 60 percent, are at Mythic or lower)—whereas in northern Europe, only 11 percent are churched. But the leading edge, in any event, and the mainstream cultural background philosophy, is Rational/Pluralistic, and NO GOD is its credo.

This gives the feeling, vis-à-vis time, that you are not moving through time, but rather time is moving through you (that is, through your awareness), with your being not moving at all. It’s like sitting in a movie theater and, without moving from your seat, having the entire scenery move past you (and if the you is “headless,” then in you).

As my Dzogchen teacher said, “Come back when you can show me something that does not have a beginning in time.

Dr. Roger Walsh, as I mentioned, is a psychiatrist and a Buddhist teacher. When he teaches meditation retreats, he often has daily sessions where he meets with individual students one-on-one and addresses the issues that are coming up in their meditation practice specifically and their life in general. And he says that around 80 percent of the issues that come up are mostly psychotherapeutic, not spiritual or meditative, and so he responds with therapeutic techniques and suggestions, not meditative or spiritual ones. If he’s anywhere near typical, then meditation teachers in particular (and spiritual teachers in general) who are not also using therapeutic techniques are giving responses to their students that are off the mark 80 percent of the time, and thus not ultimately helpful, or not as helpful as they could be.

If not, they will once again contract and move down, to the lowest state possible, the gross, egoic realm, and there they will live the life of a typical human—some happiness, much sorrow, some joy, great suffering—until and unless they take up a spiritual practice and rediscover the higher realms of their own being, ultimately WAKING UP to their vast, pure, deep, spacious, Nondual Awareness or Clear Light Void, thence to assist others in their own Waking Up.

(the average millennial gets or sends eighty-eight messages a day).

And so I trust that, in addition to reading about my suggestions and priorities, each of you will contemplate your own ideas and possibilities, and will bring them forward on any of the forums that will emerge to discuss this most significant of issues facing the modern and postmodern world, all around a common theme: “Just how inclusive do you want to be?

So the steps in 3-2-1 are: Find it, Face it, Talk to it, Be it. Step One: Find It. Locate the symptom, pressure, pain, image, person, or thing that seems to be the core of the problem—the fear, anxiety, depression, obsession, jealousy, envy, anger. Locate it, and notice everything about it—the symptoms themselves (the uncomfortable feelings generated by the problematic person, place, or event). Notice its location in your body (for example, head, eyes, chest, breasts, arms, shoulders, stomach, gut, genitals, thighs, lower legs, feet, toes, perhaps single muscles or muscle groups, sometimes bodily organ systems—digestive, urinary, reproductive, respiratory, circulatory, neuronal). Notice its general size, color, shape, smell, texture (whatever comes to mind when you think any of those elements). Notice what seems to most trigger it, what seems to soothe it, and activities that often accompany it (for example, increased heart rate, increased breathing, particular muscle tightening, headaches, difficulty swallowing, sexual inadequacy or disinterest). Don’t judge them as good or bad, positive or negative. Just pretend that you are videotaping them, taking pictures of them, exactly as they are, not as you want or wish them to be—you are aiming for just a simple, comprehensive mindfulness of them. Get a lot of plain neutral videotape on every aspect of the problem. Get it fully in your awareness as an object.

Step Two: Face It. Once you have a good deal of videotape of the problematic item, then face it. If the symptom seems to be triggered by a particular person, then locate that person in your mind, and face him or her (or them). It might help to sit in a chair and put another “empty chair” in front of you. Put the problem in the empty chair—the person, monster, image, event, or simply the symptom itself (depression, anxiety, fear, envy).

Step Three: Talk with It. Ask it numerous questions, and listen carefully to what it has to say. “Why are you here?” “What do you want?” “Why are you doing this to me?” “Where did you come from?” “How long have you been here?” “When did you start?” If it doesn’t know the answer to any of these questions, ask it to guess. “Well, you say you don’t know why you’re here. Why do you think you’re here?” When it asks you a question, answer it, and see how the problematic person or entity responds; you might even ask the problem issue what it (or he or she or them) thought of your answer. Get to know it directly as a living, breathing, creative, next-door neighbor, a person addressed in the 2nd person, converting it from a 3rd-person “him,” “her,” “them,” or “it” directly into a 2nd-person “you” or “thou.” The more you do each of these steps, the more likely you will already notice a certain diminution of the symptom itself. Then finally:

Step Four: Be It. Now, switch roles entirely. When it responds, you sit in its chair, and you yourself become the problem (person, monster, issue, and so forth). Identify with it. Speak in the dialogue as it, not to it. And speak to your regular self, sitting in the chair in front of you. Feel what it is like to be this symptom that is intentionally causing another person—the person sitting in the chair in front of you—these problems. It is here that you have to be the most observant and the most open. When the person (the regular you) sitting in front of you (as problem) asks, “Why are you doing this to me?” you have to be able to step into a role of someone who might be extremely mean-spirited and demeaning: “Because you’re a stupid little moron, and you deserve to suffer.” “You’ve always been a huge disappointment to me because you can’t do anything right.

A good way to explore those kinds of responses is to ask, “Just whose voice is that? Mom’s? Dad’s? A sibling’s? An early friend’s?” This is the opposite of projection, called “introjection,” the internalizing of an alien, false voice into your mind as if it were yours. In these cases, you don’t re-own that voice; you toss it out! So keep that possibility in mind as well. Most people have extensive nets of introjections—internalized opinions, directives, commands, drives, or notions—that they got from their parents, early teachers, close friends, and especially the culture at large. These internalized networks, part of what we call “the embedded unconscious,” are just that: embedded opinions and directives, whose internalized nature we are totally unaware of, but that tell us insistently what to think about virtually everything out there, and “in here” as well, and a significant part of shadow work is directly looking for the elements of this embedded network of introjections and then ejecting—dis-identifying with—these embedded introjected notions.

Of all the definitions of “human” provided over the ages—from the “political animal” to the “symbolic animal”—probably the most accurate is the “role-taking animal,” the capacity to see not only what one is oneself seeing but to put oneself in the shoes of an other and see the world as that other is seeing it.

What do you want?” and so on might be a few of the questions asked and responded to.

Then next up might be, “Let me speak to the wounded child,” and so on, as up to a dozen different selves are called forth and dialogued with. At the end of an hour or so of this, the teacher says, “Let me speak to Big Mind.” And in something like over 95 percent of the cases, the individual will have a direct, immediate, authentic experience of ultimate Nondual Awareness, or Big Mind. I have participated in this process several times, and seen it done many more, and I am always stunned at how effective and profound the process really is, introducing individuals to a genuine experience of the Awakened Mind, in however an introductory fashion.

When asked questions like “Is there an inside or outside to Big Mind?” everybody answers, “No.” “Is time present?” “Does Big Mind come or go?” “Do you see it out there?” are all answered, “No.” By spending a good deal of time calling forth and talking to the small, relative, finite, object selves, consciousness itself more and more dis-identifies with them, seeing them as an object, and thus comes closer and closer to the pure Witness, or pure Observing Self, or Absolute Subjectivity per se, and thus is more and more open to falling into ever-present nondual Big Mind itself in a moment’s notice.

As we saw, Gilligan’s work suggested that men tend to reason in terms of autonomy, rights, agency, justice, and ranking; and women in terms of relationship, care, responsibility, communion, and nonranking (with individual men and women capable of any of those across the whole spectrum).

As for the Enneagram, it is a sophisticated typology consisting of nine basic types, numbered from 1 to 9, whose names describe them well: (1) the perfectionist, (2) the giver, (3) the performer, (4) the romantic, (5) the observer, (6) the questioner, (7) the epicure, (8) the protector, and (9) the mediator.

Boomeritis, 297–298 This, then, is the message of Jung; the message of Maslow, Assagioli, and the whole Fourth Force; and more, of the saints, sages, and mystics, whether Amerindian, Taoist, Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian: at the bottom of your soul is the soul of humanity itself, but a divine, uncreate soul, leading from time to eternity, from death to immortality, from bondage to liberation, from enchantment to awakening.

The point is that a holon responds, and can respond, only to those stimuli that fall within its worldspace, its worldview. Everything else is nonexistent.

The point of the overall meditative path is to have Wakefulness (or Consciousness as Such) transcend and include all state-realms, so it ceases to “black out” or “forget” various changes of state (such as dreaming and deep sleep), and instead recognizes a “constant Consciousness” or ever-present nondual Awareness, the union (and transcendence) of individual finite self and infinite Spirit.

Thus, unlike the previous Pluralistic View, the Integral View is truly holistic, not in any New Age woo-woo sense but as being evidence of a deeply interwoven and interconnected and conscious Kosmos. The Pluralistic View, we saw, wants to be holistic and all-inclusive and nonmarginalizing, but it loathes the modern Rational View, absolutely cannot abide the traditional Mythic View, goes apoplectic when faced with a truly Integral View. But the Integral stages are truly and genuinely inclusive. First, all of the previous structure-rungs are literally included as components of the Integral structure-rung, or vision-logic, a fact that is intuited at this stage. Views, of course, are negated, and so somebody at an Integral View is not including directly a Magic View, a Mythic View, a Rational View, and so on. By definition, that is impossible. A View is generated when the central self exclusively identifies with a particular rung of development. Somebody at a Rational View is exclusively identified with the corresponding rung at that stage—namely, formal operational. To have access directly to, say, a Magic View—which means the View of the world when exclusively identified with the impulsive or emotional-sexual rung—the individual would have to give up Rationality, give up the concrete mind, give up the representational mind, give up language itself, and regress totally to the impulsive mind (something that won’t happen without severe brain damage). The Rational person still has complete access to the emotional-sexual rung, but not the exclusive View from that rung. As we saw, rungs are included, Views are negated. (Just like on a real ladder—if you’re at, say, the 7th rung in the ladder, all previous 6 rungs are still present and still in existence, holding up the 7th rung; but, while you are standing on the 7th rung, you can’t directly see what the world looks like from those earlier rungs. Those were gone when you stepped off those rungs onto higher ones, and so at this point you have all the rungs, but only the View from the highest rung you’re on, in this case, the 7th-rung View.) So a person at Integral doesn’t directly, in their own makeup, have immediate access to earlier Views (archaic, magic, mythic, and so on), but they do have access to all the earlier corresponding rungs (snsorimotor, emotional-sexual, conceptual, rule/role, and so on), and thus they can generally intuit what rung a particular person’s center of gravity is at, and thus indirectly be able to understand what View or worldview that person is expressing (magic, mythic, rational, pluralistic, and so on). And by “include those worldviews” what is meant is that the Integral levels actively tolerate and make room for those Views in their own holistic outreach. They might not agree fully with them (they don’t do so in their own makeup, having transcended and negated junior Views), but they intuitively understand the significance and importance of all Views in the unfolding sweep of evolutionary development. Further, they understand that a person has the right to stop growing at virtually any View, and thus each particular View will become, for some people, an actual station in Life, and their values, needs, and motivations will be expressions of that particular View in Life. And thus a truly enlightened, inclusive society will make some sort of room for traditional values, modern values, postmodern values, and so on. Everybody is born at square 1 and thus begins their development of Views at the lowest rung and continues from there, so every society will consist of a different mix of percentages of people at different altitude rungs and Views of the overall spectrum. In most Western countries, for example—and this varies depending on exactly how you measure it—but generally, about 10% of the population is at Magic, 40% at traditional Mythic, 40%-50% at modern Rational, 20% at postmodern Pluralistic, 5% at Holistic/Integral, and less than 1% at Super-Integral.

Finally, in terms of overall spiritual intelligence—which we have been briefly tracking—on the other side of the leading edge of evolution we have 3 or 4 higher, at this point mostly potential, levels of development, including levels of spiritual intelligence. Individually, their basic strcture-rungs are referred to as para-mind, meta-mind, overmind, and supermind; collectively, they are called 3rd tier. What all 3rd-tier structures have in common is some degree of direct transpersonal identity and experience. Further, each 3rd-tier structure of consciousness is integrated, in some fashion, with a particular state of consciousness (often, para-mental with the gross, meta-mental with subtle, overmind with causal/Witnessing, and supermind with nondual, although this varies with each individual’s actual history). Previously, in 1sst and 2nd tier, structures and states were relatively independent. One could have a state center of gravity at gross and yet structurally evolve all the way to Integral without fully objectifying the gross stage (i.e., fully making it an object, fully transcending it). But beginning with the 3rd-tier para-mind, whenever you experience that structure, you also implicitly or intuitively understand or experience the gross realm as objectified, which means that state is intimately connected to the structure at this level, which gives rise, or can give rise, to expanded states such as nature mysticism (this can be experienced at earlier levels but not inherently, and is interpreted according to the Views of those lower levels; but at this level becomes an inherent potential). Likewise, because of the conjunction with the gross state, this level often carries variations of the realization that the physical world is not merely physical, but is rather psychophysical in its true nature. This can also evoke flashes of higher state presences, such as Witnessing states or even nondual. And so on with the subtle state and meta-mind; causal/Witnessing and overmind; and nondual Suchness and supermind. Those states are all “minimally” connected to those structures, in the sesne that, for example, a person at meta-mind might have already and previously moved his or her state center of gravity to subtle, but if not, the person cannot proceed beyond the meta-mind without doing so at this point. And likewise with causal/Witnessing and overmind; and nondual Suchness and supermind.

El Espíritu no es un estadio particular ni una ideología concreta ni tampoco un dios o una diosa preferidos sino la totalidad del proceso de desarrollo, un proceso infinito que, aunque se halla completamente presente en cada uno de los estadios finitos, deviene cada vez más accesible en cada nueva apertura evolutiva.

Pero, sea inocente o arrogante, sagrada o profana, la ignorancia es la ignorancia y toda ignorancia destruye la biosfera.

¡Esa especie de paracaidista que contempla el mundo desde fuera está hundido hasta el cuello en contextos y sustratos que determinan el alcance de su visión!

Aun en el caso de que usted aporte su propia interpretación individual sobre Hamlet —lo cual es absolutamente correcto—, esa interpretación estará arraigada en las realidades y los contextos de su vida real. ¡En cualquier caso, el hecho es que la interpretación no es algo meramente arbitrario!

I once got to meet a man who many say is one of the most brilliant minds alive today. Ken Wilber is the most widely translated academic

The rational scientists—and “new atheists”—believe the “sensitive, caring” postmodern Pluralists are loopy and “woo-woo,” and that the traditional religious fundamentalists are archaic, childish, and dangerous. The postmodern Pluralists think that both the Rational scientists and the traditional fundamentalists are caught up in “socially constructed” modes of knowing, which are culturally relative and have no more binding power than poetry or fashion styles; this “knowledge” gives the Pluralist an enormous sense of superiority (although in their worldview, nothing is supposed to be superior). And the traditional fundamentalists think that both the modern Rational scientists and the postmodern Pluralists are all unbelieving heathens, bound for an everlasting hell, so who cares what they think anyway?

Originated by the green leading-edge in academia, this aperspectival madness of “no truth” leapt out of the universities, and morphed into an enormous variety of different forms—from direct “no-truth” claims, to rabid egalitarianism, to excessive censoring of free speech and unhampered knowledge acquisition, to extreme political correctness (that forced the best comedians to refuse to perform at colleges any more, since the audiences “lacked all sense of humor”: you’re allowed to laugh at nothing in a “no value is better” world—even though that value itself is held to be better), to far-left political agendas that in effect “equalized poverty,” to egalitarian “no judgment” attitudes that refused to see any “higher” or “better” views at all (even though its own view was judged “higher” and “better” than any other), to modes of entertainment that everywhere eulogized egalitarian atland, to a denial of all growth hierarchies by confusing them with dominator hierarchies (which effectively crushed all routes to actual growth in any systems anywhere), to the media’s sense of egalitarian “fairness” that ended up trying to give equal time to every possible, no matter how factually idiotic, alternative viewpoint (such as Holocaust deniers), to echo chambered social media where “pleasant lies” and “reassuring falsehoods” were the standard currency.

Green will typically look at history, for example, and whenever it finds a society in which there is a widespread lack of green values, it assumes that these green values would normally and naturally be present were it not for the fact that they have been maliciously oppressed by the dominator hierarchies found in that society. All individuals would possess worldcentric green values of pluralism, radical egalitarianism, and total equality, except for the oppressive controlling powers that crushed those values wherever they appeared. […] The existence of strong and widespread oppressive forces cannot be doubted. The problem comes in the claim to know what their source and cause is. For green postmodernism, the cause of the lack of worldcentric green values in any culture is due to an aggressive and intensively active repressive and oppressive force (usually the male sex; or a particular race— white in most parts of the world, coupled with a rampant colonialism— and/or due to a particular creed—usually religious fundamentalism of one sort or another; or various prejudices—against gays, against women, against whatever minority that is oppressed). In short, lack of green values (egalitarian, group freedom, gender equality, human care and sensitivity) is due to a presence of oppression. […] The major problem with that view taken by itself is that it completely overlooks the central role of growth, development, and evolution. We’ve already seen that human moral identity grows and develops from egocentric (red) to ethnocentric (amber) to worldcentric (orange then green) to integral (turquoise; and this is true individually as well as collectively/historically). Thus, the main reason that slavery was present, say, 2000 years ago, is not because there was an oppressive force preventing worldcentric freedom, but that a worldcentric notion of freedom had not even emerged yet anywhere on the planet. It wasn’t present and then oppressed, as green imagines, it simply had not yet emerged in the first place—there was nothing to oppress. This is why, as only one example, all of the world’s great religions, who otherwise teach love and compassion and treating all beings kindly, nonetheless—precisely because they were created during the great ethnocentric Mythic Age of traditional civilization —had no extensive and widespread conception of the fundamental worldcentric freedom of human beings—or the belief that all humans, regardless of race, sex, color, or creed, were born equal—and thus not one of them strenuously objected to the fact that a very large portion of their own population were slaves. Athens and Greek society, vaunted home of democracy, had 1 out of 3 of their people who were slaves—and no major complaint on a culture-wide scale. Nor was there a widespread culturally effective complaint from Christianity or Buddhism or Hinduism et al. It wasn’t until the emergence of the worldcentric Age of Reason that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” actually came into existence—emerged evolutionarily—and thus started to be believed by the average and typical member of that culture.

Put differently, oppressive actions and drives are inherent in the lower stages of development. […] A lower, pre-worldcentric stage of development will step all over worldcentric values if it can, not because it is trying to specifically oppress those values, but because it does not yet possess those values itself and has no understanding of their value, goodness, or desirability. The cure for this is to move development forward, not to criminalize earlier stages (which is like calling age 5 a disease and outlawing it).

When Thomas Jefferson sat on the steps of the White House and, with a pair of scissors, began to cut out all portions of the Bible that he felt were mythic nonsense, he was expressing a rational point of view.

There’s not much to be said about the period, except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.

Wilber, the only people that I think are nuts are the ones who don’t put their necks out once in a while. Do you think you’re nuts?

distance, a holistic concept if ever there was one. (Incidentally, there is an excellent book on the new physics—Heinz Pagels’s The Cosmic Code21—which is the only book I can unreservedly recommend on the topic.

When I was thirty, I discovered the work of Ken Wilber and found myself ease into a sense of clarity and peace because everything finally

En La conciencia sin fronteras, Ken Wilber nos ofrece una precisa y a la vez amena introducción sobre las diferentes maneras de solucionar la fractura de nuestra identidad integrando todas las herramientas, tanto occidentales como orientales, que han aparecido en los últimos años.

En La conciencia sin fronteras, Ken Wilber logró una hazaña desconocida hasta la época: escribir un libro claro y democrático, pero a la vez serio y riguroso, que integraba las técnicas de desarrollo personal occidentales y  orientales

that which one can deviate from is not the true Tao.

In understandably wishing to increase freedom and liberty, it paradoxically left massive road kill everywhere on the highway to rational heaven.

The typical, well-meaning liberal approach to solving social tensions is to treat every value as equal, and then try to force a leveling or redistribution of resources (money, rights, goods, land) while leaving the values untouched. The typical conservative approach is take its particular values and try to foist them on everybody else. The developmental approach is to realize that there are many different values and worldviews; that some are more complex than others; that many of the problems at one stage of development can only be defused by evolving to a higher level; and that only by recognizing and facilitating this evolution can social justice be finally served.

The fundamental message is self-righteous, and it takes this form: ‘T. S. Eliot is a homophobe and I am not. Therefore, I am a better person than Eliot.’ To which the proper response is: ‘But T. S. Eliot could really write, and you can’t.

All the Ping-Pong and pool tables, on-site chefs, Nerf hoops, and stereo systems cannot make up for the truth that some places work people like dogs.

Thus, he says, those who would “eliminate from the universe” what they think of as “inferior beings” would simply “eliminate Providence itself,” whose nature it is to “produce all things and to diversify all in the manner of their existence.

In North America, human sacrifice was practiced by the Heron and Pawnee tribes, although evidence now suggests that a particularly brutal form of ritual immolation was carried out by the Anasazi tribes of the Southwest, ancestors of the Hopi, Zuñi, and Pueblo. Like the Maya and Incas, the Anasazi have become a focal point for intense, especially New Age, beliefs.

Hence, in shorthand, the meaning of a statement is the injunction of its enactment. No injunction, no enactment, no meaning. That is, mere metaphysics.

I had my own test, better than Turing’s: when a computer could genuinely convince me that it wanted to commit suicide.

You have to know that there actually is a transcendental something, if you are going to free anybody from anything—if there is no beyond-the-given, there is no freedom from the given, and liberation is futile.

This is a crucial point, because it alerts us to the fact that, no matter how high-minded, idealistic, or altruistic a cause might appear—from ecology to cultural diversity to spirituality to world peace—the simple mouthing of intense support for that cause is not enough to determine why, in fact, that cause is being embraced.

You can only do so much damage to the biosphere with a bow and arrow. An atomic bomb is something else. The same ignorance backed by industry is capable of killing the entire world. So we have to separate those two issues—the ignorance and the means of inflicting that ignorance—because with modernity and science we have, for the first time in history, a way to overcome our ignorance, at precisely the same time that we have created the means to make this ignorance absolutely genocidal on a global scale.

counselors, often confuses stages, states, and lines. He mentioned that clients could move through all four stages (sensorimotor to formal operations) in a single counseling session. People do not actually develop through four (or even two) stages in a day. Rather, different lines of development may be differentially developed, so that a client may appear to exhibit very rudimentary development in one aspect (for example, morality) and advanced development in another (scientific or mathematical thinking). Similar phenomena (clients’ appearing to exhibit the qualities of different stages of development) can be accounted for by distinguishing between stages and states of consciousness. For example, a client may have a developmental center of gravity that hovers around the formal-reflexive mind but experience a state of panic or intense depression during which he resorts to the type of illogical and contrary-to-evidence thinking that characterize preoperational thinking. There are a few places where Ivey seems to distinguish between stages and states, as when he is describing a concrete operational client with whom the counselor finds various deletions, distortions, overgeneralizations, and other errors of thinking or behaving that “represent preoperational states” (1986, p. 163, italics added). This is an important point. The basic structures are not completely stable; otherwise, they would endure even under extreme stress. Hence, developmental waves are conceived of as relatively stable and enduring—far more stable and enduring than states of consciousness, but also far from rigidly permanent structures. Levels and Lines of Development Ivey also wrote of how clients cycle through Piaget’s stages of cognitive development: Each person who continues on to higher levels of development is also, paradoxically, forced to return to basic sensori-motor and pre-operational experience… . the skilled individual who decides to learn a foreign language … must enter language training at the lowest level and work through sensori-motor, preoperational, and concrete experience before being able to engage in formal operations with the new language. (Ivey, 1986, p. 161) People do not revert from the capacity for formal operational thinking to sensorimotor, except perhaps because of a brain injury or organic disorders of the nervous system. Piaget was very emphatic that cognitive development occurs in invariant stages, meaning that everyone progresses through the stages in the same order. At the same time, it is true that just because an individual exhibits formal operational thinking (a stage or level of cognitive development) in chemistry and mathematics does not mean that she automatically can perform at mastery levels in any domain, such as, in this case, a foreign language. This is another example of the utility of Wilber’s (2000e) distinguishing the sundry lines

We see further because we stand on the shoulders of giants.

In this regard, a hotly disputed topic is whether the spiritual/transpersonal stages themselves can be conceived as higher levels of cognitive development. The answer, I have suggested, depends on what you mean by “cognitive.

Wilber’s framework provides a simple answer: to shape the culture (the lower-left quadrant), you can pursue three avenues in parallel: Put supportive structures, practices, and processes in place (lower-right quadrant) Ensure that people with moral authority in the company role-model the behavior associated with the culture (upper-right quadrant) Invite people to explore how their personal belief system supports or undermines the new culture (upper-left quadrant)

Como sucedía en todas las ciudades-estado, la ciudad de Atenas tenía sus propios dioses y diosas míticas, en nombre de los cuales condenó a Sócrates «por ser culpable de negarse a reconocer a los dioses del Estado… y el castigo que merece es la muerte». Y cuando se le preguntó, como era habitual, que sugiriera un castigo alternativo, él propuso nada menos que ser alimentado por el Estado. Sócrates, en suma, eligió la razón sobre el mito y por ello fue condenado a beber la cicuta. Mil quinientos años más tarde el mundo dio un vuelco, la polis obligó a los dioses a beber la cicuta y de la muerte de esos dioses surgieron las modernas democracias.

starting with the Renaissance and running through the Enlightenment, there occurred what we might call “the great reversal.” Suddenly, very suddenly, the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in—and the transition was bloody, arguably the bloodiest cognitive transformation in European history.

Oppression as a causal explanation is deficient and inadequate in almost every respect, since, among other things, it simply does not fit the data curve. “These oppression theories,” says Chafetz, “are based on vaguely defined concepts often ill suited to operationalization, such as ‘patriarchy,’ ‘female subordination,’ and ‘sexism.’ The use of such emotion-laden but unclear terms, combined typically with a heavily normative approach to the topic of sex inequality, results in a maximum of rhetoric but a minimum of clear insight.” No, this polarization of the sexes—with males dominating the public/productive sphere and females dominating the private/reproductive, to the detriment of both—has virtually nothing to do with male oppression and female sheepdom/subjugation. It has everything to do with life in the biosphere.

The noosphere, not the biosphere, would determine rights and responsibilities. And these rights were not previously repressed, they were previously meaningless (they were not oppressed, they had simply not yet emerged).

Because the amazing fact is that truth alone will not set you free. Truthfulness will set you free.

In this regard, the pure Ego or pure Self is virtually identical with what the Hindus call Atman (or the pure Witness that itself is never witnessed—is never an object—but contains all objects in itself).

even as it surreptitiously dipped into that dimension for its own hidden judgments, judgments which it forcefully and vehemently made and then flat-out denied making. “Empirical knowledge alone is true knowledge”—and where is the empirical proof for that?

The belief in the sanctity of one’s idiosyncrasy—especially if it be a group idiosyncrasy, and therefore sustained and intensified by mutual flattery—is rapidly converted into a belief in its superiority. More

The “Higher Self” camp is notoriously immune to social concerns. Everything that happens to one is said to be “one’s own choice”—the hyper-agentic Higher Self is responsible for everything that happens—this is the monological and totally disengaged Ego gone horribly amok in omnipotent self-only fantasies. This simply represses the networks of communions that are just as important as agency in constituting the manifestation of Spirit. This is not Eros; this is Phobos—a withdrawal from social engagement and intersubjective action. All of this totally overlooks the fact that Spirit manifests not only as Self (I) but as intersubjective Community (We) and as an objective State of Affairs (It)—as Buddha, Sangha, Dharma—each inseparably interwoven with the others and interwoven in the Good and the Goodness of the All.

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.

BELL HOOKS: “I’m so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer. I think the worst thing that can happen to us is to lose sight of the power of empathy and compassion.” MAYA

God commanded that the Sabbath day be kept as a special day of rest. The earliest Christians kept this commandment.

God declared the Sabbath to be a permanent sign between him and his people, Israel (Exodus 31:13).

Yeshua calls us to live as kingdom members so that others “may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven” (Matthew 5:16).

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. —Matthew 5:17

Keys to Great Writing by Stephen Wilbers. This is our favorite book on the list. It teaches you the mechanics of writing well. It’s brilliantly concise and is full of techniques that actually work. You have probably never heard of most of them. You may enjoy this book even if you hated English classes at school. We suspect that it particularly appeals to programmers, because it provides a much-needed logical framework for writing. The book summarizes several other books, including two other favorites of ours: Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace and The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader’s Perspective

evolution meanders more than it progresses. But over the long haul, evolution has a broad telos, a broad direction, which is particularly obvious with increasing differentiation—an atom to an amoeba to an ape!

There is a spectrum of depth, a spectrum of consciousness. And evolution unfolds that spectrum. Consciousness unfolds more and more, realizes itself more and more, comes into manifestation more and more. Spirit, consciousness, depth—so many words for the same thing.

Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace. And in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, just maybe, an individual’s consciousness does indeed touch infinity—a total embrace of the entire Kosmos—a Kosmic consciousness that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature.

Feminism doesn't get the credit for the concept that women have equal value; the Bible taught this concept first.