Ken Wilber Quotes - Page 7

Furthermore, it is not that Spirit is present but you need to be enlightened in order to see it. It is not that you are one with Spirit but just don't know it yet. Because that would also imply that there is some place Spirit is not. No, according to Dzogchen, you are always already one with Spirit, and that awareness is always already fully present, right now. You are looking directly at Spirit, with Spirit, in every act of awareness. There is nowhere Spirit is not.

... they are structures that we build every time we engage in a thought that's just a little bit higher than a thought we had a moment before, or an activity that's just a little bit more noble than the activity we engaged in a moment before.

So it is a good idea to start simple, I think, and be very careful. There is a spiritual opening in the Kosmos. Let us be careful of how we fill it. The simplest is: Spirit or Emptiness is unqualifiable, but it is not inert and unyielding, for it gives rise to manifestation itself: new forms emerge, and that creativity is ultimate. Emptiness, creativity, holons.

The Self doesn't live forever in time, it lives in the timeless present prior to time, prior to history, change, succession. The Self is present as Pure Presence, not as everlasting duration, a rather horrible notion.

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.

Do you even recognize your own consciousness?

If humanity doesn't destroy the planet first, which is always a possibility because as Spirit threw itself out there, that included free will. So, if we don't blow ourselves up first, soul will become as common of a mature development in adults as mind currently is and, eventually, Spirit will become the common experience for humanity.

There are several different meanings of the words "religion" and "spirituality," all of which are important. The whole point about an integral or comprehensive approach is that it must find a way to believably include all of those important meanings in a coherent whole.

If a culture treats a particular illness with compassion and enlightened understanding, then sickness can be seen as a challenge, as a healing crisis and opportunity. Being sick is then not a condemnation or a moral judgement, but a movement in a larger process of healing and restoration. When sickness is viewed positively and in supportive terms, then illness has a much better chance to heal, with the concomitant result that the entire person may grown and be enriched in the process.

These two enormous forces - truth and meaning - are at war in today's world... And something sooner or later has to give.

Is this a topic whose time has truly come? The integration of science and religion? Or have I just written a clever book that temporarily impressed a few people and will otherwise go as quickly as it came?

One of the extraordinary things about awakening is that it carries with it the realization that there is only Spirit. Even the things of the world that we look at as problems are simply part of the way the world manifests, because it does so in terms of opposites.

It is flat-out strange that something-that anything-is happening at all. There was nothing then a Big Bang, then here we all are. This is extremely weird.

And as for baby-boomer parents cluck-clucking about illegal substances, ah, gimme a break. Still, I think I'll pass on the rave. But more power to 'em, I say.

There is nothing in the universe but matter.

Religion is just coded spirituality.

I believe that evidence shows that there is a real spirit, a real Beach, but it is beneath no pavement whatsoever, for all pavements arise within it: Spirit is all-encompassing. It transcends everything, it includes everything.

The Big Bang has made Idealists out of almost anybody who thinks. First there was absolutely nothing, then Bang! Something. This is beyond weird. Out of sheerest Emptiness, manifestation arises.

I think I was a born scientist.

The most striking feature of the perennial philosophy/psychology is that it presents being and consciousness as a hierarchy of dimensional levels, moving from the lowest, densest, and most fragmentary realms to the highest, subtlest, and most unitary ones.

This is the world of One Taste, with no inside and no outside, no subject and no object, no in here versus out there, without means, without path and without goal. And this, as Ramana said, is the final truth.

The nondual universe of One Taste arises as a spontaneous gesture of your own true nature.

I went to Duke University in the medical track. And then I decided I wanted to do something more creative, so I switched to biochemistry at Nebraska.

We are part and parcel of a single and all-encompassing evolutionary current that is itself Spirit-in-action, the mode and manner of Spirit's creation, and thus is always going beyond what went before-that leaps, not crawls, to new plateaus of truth, only to leap again, dying and being reborn with each new quantum lurch, often stumbling and bruising its metaphyscical knees, yet always getting right back up and jumping yet again.

Like going to the dentist, where you write: "Dental appointment today. All of the dentists in Boulder are 'holistic.' They can't fill a cavity but they're good for your soul. Your teeth rot, but apparently your spirit prospers."