KEN WILBER

In 1949, in Oklahoma City, the United States, this writer and philosopher was born as Kenneth Earl Wilber II, he enrolled in two universities and dropped out after he decided to develop his own ideas, related to philosophy, mysticism, spirituality , ecology and psychology.

In this sense, his books, where he explains his theories, are a real finding. In the first of these, ‘The Spectrum of Consciousness’ he addresses what knowledge is from very different fields. He continued with the anthology of essays by various authors and his own ‘The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes’ where he reviews this paradigm in relation to consciousness, the mystical and science. In ‘Grace and Grit,’ he shows the experience of accompanying his wife in her fight against breast cancer; after her death, Wilber has continued to publish about science and religion, unity consciousness, sociology and politics and psychology. We can also mention his novel ‘Boomeritis’ and ‘A Theory of Everything’.

In all his work, and also from the Integral Institute he founded in 1998, Ken Wilber has developed the Integral Theory, which describes that all the knowledge and experience of a person can be placed in a scheme of four modules (called AQAL): from Individual Interior enclosing the intention (I), the Individual Exterior directs behavior (It), the Collective Interior unites us by culture (We) and the Collective Exterior of the social (They). For the Kosmos (world) is complete, it must include all four quadrants. To these all, a higher consciousness that gives meaning to the world transcends, for the sake of feeling is always absolute, unlike the other levels.

Wilber refers to the influence of Mahayana Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta, from which it draws that reality is a non-dual union of emptiness and form. At present, the writer focuses on writing about this Integral Spirituality.

Here are some of his phrases:

The ego is not a true subject. The ego is just another object. In other words, you can be aware of your ego, you can see your ego and although certain aspects of the ego are unconscious, all of them can, at least theoretically, turn into objects of consciousness. The ego can be seen, you could be found. And if that is so, can never be He-to-Go or He-Who-Knows neither the Witness. The ego is nothing but a handful of mental objects, a set of ideas, symbols, mental images and concepts that we have identified. We identify with those objects and then use them as something through which we look, and therefore distort the world.

 

Most Western intellectual disciplines do not address the “world itself” and what that deal is symbolic representations of the world. For very detailed and illustrated that such representations are, they are still nothing more than just that: mere representations.

 

The more developed person is one who can put themselves in the shoes of a lot of different people.

 

A good science is the foundation of a proper spirituality and vice versa. In the transpersonal development of Being, one cannot co-exist without the other. Therefore, I can say, without fear of contradiction, that a deep, real and coherent […] base of individual psychotherapy is necessary and a parallel condition (in this sense) to reach an acceptable and full realization of the Self (in its integral) sense. Otherwise, we would fall into the so-called “spiritual bypass.”

 

The time of descent and discovery begins as one feels consciously dissatisfied with life.

 

Contrary to the view of most practitioners, this gnawing dissatisfaction with life is not a sign of “mental illness”, not a hint of social maladjustment, not a character disorder.

 

This basic unhappiness to life conceals the embryo of a growing intelligence, special, usually buried under the immense weight of social shames.

 

When a person begins to experience the suffering of life, at the same time they begin to be aware of deeper realities. And more valid ones, for suffering destroys the complacency of our normal fictions about reality and forces us to wake up in a special sense: to see carefully, to feel deeply, to make contact with ourselves and our world, and doing so in a way we had avoided until then.

 

I wish a happy week,

Álex Rovira