223 Quotes by Ken Wilber

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.

So spirit is both the highest “level” in the holarchy, but it’s also the paper on which the entire holarchy is written. It’s the highest rung in the ladder, but it’s also the wood out of which the entire ladder is made.

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.

The understanding of “evolutionary consciousness” is perhaps the most important thing lacking in spiritual practices today. Evolution means growth and development. This means that there are aspects of reality that have not yet arisen in our consciousness. But they will arise if we grow.

What is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It’s not the spirit in you, since that is already enlightened, and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher.

I’m not nearly the saint some of my fans imagine and I’m nowhere near the devil my detractors wish, so you simply take both of those with a grain of salt.

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.

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

It is not quite right to describe One Taste as a “consciousness” or an “awareness,” because that’s a little too heady, too cognitive. It’s more like the simple Feeling of Being. You already feel this simple Feeling of Being: it is the simple, present feeling of existence.