On Philosophy
"To have any meaning at all, philosophy must sizzle with passion, boil your brain, fry your eyeballs, or you're just not doing it right. And that applies to the other end of the spectrum of feelings as well. Real philosophy is as gentle as fog and as quiet as tears; it holds the world as if it were a delicate infant, raw and open and vulnerable. I sincerely hope that if I have brought anything to this field, it is a bit of passion."
—The Simple Feeling of Being
On Openness
"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."
—A Theory of Everything
On Spirit
"Spirit, and enlightenment, has to be something that you are fully aware of right now.Something you are already looking at right now.As I was receiving these teachings, I thought of the old puzzles in the Sunday supplement section of the newspaper, where there is a landscape and the caption says, 'The faces of twenty famous people are hidden in this landscape. Can you spot them?' The faces were maybe Walter Cronkite, John Kennedy, that kind of thing. The point is that you are looking right at the faces. You don't need to see anything more in order to be looking at the faces. They are completely entering your visual field already, you just don't recognize them. If you still can't find them, then somebody comes along and simply points them out.
"It's the same way with Spirit or enlightenment, I thought. We are all already looking directly at Spirit, we just don't recognize it."
—Grace and Grit
The Eye of Spirit
"When I rest in simple, clear, ever-present awareness, I am resting in intrinsic Spirit; I am in fact nothing other than witnessing Spirit itself. I do not become Spirit; I simply recognize the Spirit that I always already am. When I rest in simple, clear, ever-present awareness, I am the Witness of the World. I am the eye of Spirit. I see the world as God sees it. I see the world as the Goddess sees it. I see the world as Spirit sees it: every object an object of Beauty, every thing and event a gesture of the Great Perfection, every process a ripple in the pond of my own eternal Being, so much so that I do not stand apart as a separate witness, but find the witness is one taste with all that arises within it. The entire Kosmos arises in the eye of Spirit, in the I of Spirit, in my own intrinsic awareness, this simple ever-present state, and I am simply that."
—The Eye of Spirit
Superior Art
"When I directly view, say, a great Van Gogh, I am reminded of what all superior art has in common: the capacity to simply take your breath away. To literally, actually, make you inwardly gasp, at least for that second or two when the art first hits you, or more accurately, first enters your being: you swoon a little bit, you are slightly stunned, you are open to perceptions that you had not seen before. Sometimes, of course, it is much quieter than that: the work seeps into your pores gently, and yet you are changed somehow, maybe just a little, maybe a lot; but you are changed."
—The Essential Ken Wilber
The Integral Approach
"In the past two decades, a radically new theoretical framework for organizing the world and activities in it has started to achieve prominence and widespread recognition. Known as the Integral Approach, it has been used in everything from business to medicine, psychology to law, politics to sustainability, art to education. Because the Integral Framework claims to be comprehensive or inclusive, each discipline using it has been able to reorganize itself in more comprehensive, effective, efficient, and inclusive ways. The Integral Approach itself does not add any content to these disciplines; it simply shows them the areas of their own approaches that are less than integral or less than comprehensive, and this acts as a guide for reorganizing the disciplines in ways that are proving to be, in some cases, nothing less than revolutionary."
—Integral Spirituality
Push Yourself
"We need to be gentle with ourselves, it is true; but we also need to be firm. Treat yourself with real compassion, not idiot compassion, and therefore begin to challenge yourself, engage yourself, push yourself: begin to practice. . . . The point is simple: If you are interested in genuine transformative spirituality, find an authentic spiritual teacher and begin practice. Without practice, you will never move beyond the phases of belief, faith, and random peak experiences. You will never evolve into plateau experiences, nor from there into permanent adaptation. You will remain, at best, a brief visitor in the territory of your own higher estate, a tourist in your own true Self."
—One Taste
One Taste
"The desires of the flesh, the ideas of the mind, and the luminosities of the soul — all are perfect expressions of the radiant Spirit that alone inhabits the universe, sublime gestures of that Great Perfection that alone outshines the world. There is only One Taste in the entire Kosmos, and that taste is Divine, whether it appears in the flesh, in the mind, in the soul. Resting in that One Taste, transported beyond the mundane, the world arises in the purest Freedom and radiant Release, happy to infinity, lost in all eternity, and hopeless in the original face of the unrelenting mystery. From One Taste all things issue, to One Taste all things return — and in between, which is the story of this moment, there is only the dream, and sometimes the nightmare, from which we would do well to awaken."
—One Taste
Good Days and Bad Days
"Brightness and darkness don't stop alternating just because you practice sincerely. In fact, practice itself stirs up both! Because practice creates life changes, it disturbs the status quo of your previous existence. Any system will try to restore its previous balance. Thus, practice inherently calls up resistance to practice. Bad days are built into the practice life, unavoidable. And so are good days.
"If you practice only on good days, your previous habit patterns will remain strong. Your bad days will keep coming as before. And when your good days come along, and you're ready to practice again, you'll be starting over again near square one.
"Alternatively, if you honor your intention to practice during your bad days, your unconscious patterns will weaken. On your good days, choosing to practice will feel most fulfilling and sometimes produce high state experiences or even glimpses of perspectives characterizing higher stages of awareness. However, on your most ordinary days, when nothing seems to be happening, consistent practice is an investment in future openings, a way to make yourself prone to 'lucky accidents.' "
—Integral Life Practice
