Author: Ken Wilber
Brief Info: American philosopher and author
Years Lived: 1949-
More Info: <link>
Quotations
The Beautiful, the Good and the True
If you are talking to me about your new car, you are the first person, I am the second person, and the car is the third person. These pronouns actually represent three perspectives that human beings can take when they talk about the world or attempt to know the world…. The fascinating part is that these three perspectives might actually give rise to art, morals, and science. Or the Beautiful, the Good, and the True: the Beauty that is in the eye (or the I) of the beholder; the Good or moral actions that can exist between you and me as a we; and the objective Truth about third-person objects (or its) that you and I might discover: hence, art (I), morals (we), and science (it).
From the book A Brief History of Everything
— 1996
The Left Hand Dimension
But the main point is that this Left Hand dimension refers to the inside, to the interior depth that is consciousness itself.
Q: You said earlier that depth is consciousness, or what depth looked like from within.
KW: Yes, exactly. The Left Hand is what the holon looks like from within; the Right Hand is what the same holon looks like from without. Interior and exterior. Consciousness and form. Subjective and objective.
From the book A Brief History of Everything
— 1996
An Integral God
An archaic God sees divinity in any strong instinctual force. A magic God locates divine power in the human ego and its magical capacity to change the animistic world with rituals and spells. A mythic God is located not on this earth but in a heavenly paradise not of this world, entrance to which is gained by living according to the covenants and rules given by this God to his peoples. A mental God is a rational God, a demythologized Ground of Being that underlies all forms of existence. And an integral God is one that embraces all of the above.
From the essay “Beliefnet”
— 2004
Everybody Has Some Important Pieces of the Truth
My work is an attempt to make room in the Kosmos for all of the dimensions, levels, domains, waves, memes, modes, individuals, cultures, and so on ad infinitum. 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.
From the book Collected Works of Ken Wilber, Volume 8
— 2000
Homophobia
An integral approach acknowledges that all views have a degree of truth, but some views are more true than others, more evolved, more developed, more adequate. And so let’s get that part out of the way right now: homophobia in any form, as far as I can tell, stems from a lower level of human development – but it is a level, it exists, and one has to make room in one’s awareness for those lower levels as well, just as one has to include third grade in any school curriculum. Just don’t, you know, put those people in charge of anything important.
From the book Collected Works of Ken Wilber, Volume 8
— 2000
Art and Spirit
And whatever we mean by the word ‘spirit’ – let us just say, with Tillich, that it involves for each of us our ultimate concern – it is in that simple awestruck moment when great art enters you and changes you, that spirit shines in this world just a little more brightly than it did the moment before.
From the book The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad
— 1997
All the World's Cultures Now Available to Us
During the last 30 years, we have witnessed a historical first: all of the world’s cultures are now available to us.
…for the first time, the sum total of human knowledge is available to us–the knowledge, experience, wisdom and reflection of all major human civilizations–premodern, modern and postmodern–are open to study by anyone.
From the book the integral vision
— 2007
Levels of Development
To grasp what is involved with levels or stages, let’s use a very simple model possessing only 3 of them. If we look at moral development, for example, we find that an infant at birth has not yet been socialized into the culture’s ethics and conventions: this is called the preconventional stage. It is also called egocentric, in that the infant’s awareness is largely self-absorbed. But as the young child begins to learns its culture’s rules and norms, it grows into the conventional stage of morals. This stage is also called ethnocentric, in that it centers on the child’s particular group, tribe, clan, or nation, and it therefore tends to exclude those not of its group. But at the next major stage of moral development, the postconventional stage, the individual’s identity expands once again, this time to include a care and concern for all peoples, regardless of race, color, sex or creed, which is why this stage is also called worldcentric.
Thus, moral development tends to move from ‘me’ (egocentric) to ‘us’ (ethnocentric) to ‘all of us’ (worldcentric)–a good example of the unfolding waves of consciousness.
From the book the integral vision
— 2007