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Famous Ken Wilber Quotes

“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.”

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Author:Ken Wilber
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“Human beings are born and begin their evolution through the great spiral of consciousness, moving from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to perhaps integral, and from there perhaps into genuinely transpersonal domains. But for every person that moves into integral or higher, dozens are born into the archaic.”

HumansPersonsMovingBornHuman BeingsConsciousnessMagicEvolutionHigherRationalDozenDomainSpirals
Book:A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality
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“This transformation is already proceeding, and if we want to consciously find these evolutionary currents operating in our own being as well-if we want to consciously join Spirit-in-action-then the four quardrants can help us orient ourselves more effectively, can help us become more conscious of the evolutionary currents already flowing around us and through us and in us.”

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Author:Ken Wilber
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“When it comes to spiritual teachers, there are those safe, gentle, consoling, soothing, caring; and there are the outlaws, the living terrors, the Rude Boys and Nasty Girls of God realization, the men and women who are in your face, disturbing you terrifying you, until you radically awaken to who and what you really are.”

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Author:Ken Wilber
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“You can indeed be aware of your body, but you can also be aware of your mind - you can right now notice all the thoughts and ideas and images floating in front of the mind's inward eye. You can, in other words, experience your mind, be aware of your mind. And it's very important to experience your mind directly, cleanly, intensely, because only by bringing awareness to the mind can you begin to transcend the mind and be free of its limitations.”

MindImportantIdeasBodyEyeAwarenessFrontsRight NowYour BodyLimitationInwardFloatingThoughts And Ideas
Book:The Essential Ken Wilber
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“And whatever the form of your own resurrection, you will arise, driven not by the Great Search, but by your own Great Duty, your limitless Dharma, the manifestation of your own highest potentials, and the world will begin to change because of you. And you will never flinch, and you will never fail in that great Duty, and you will never turn away, because simple, ever-present awareness will be with you now and forever, even unto the end of the worlds, because now and forever and endlessly forever, there is only Spirit, only intrinsic awareness of just this, and nothing more.”

WorldEndsFormSpiritTurnsSimpleForeverFailingAwarenessDutyHighestDrivenAriseManifestationResurrectionEnd Of The WorldLimitlessDharmaBecause Of You
Book:The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad
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“If Spirit has any meaning, it must be omnipresent, or all-pervading and all-encompassing. There can't be a place where Spirit is not, or it wouldn't be infinite. Therefore, Spirit has to be completely present, right here, right now, in your own awareness. That is, your own present awareness, precisely as it is, without changing it or altering it in any way, is perfectly and completely permeated by Spirit.”

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Author:Ken Wilber
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“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.”

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Book:Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber
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“Further, if Spirit has any meaning at all, then it must be eternal, or without beginning or end. If Spirit had a beginning in time, then it would be strictly temporal, it would not be timeless and eternal. And this means, as regards your own awareness, that you cannot become enlightened. You cannot attain enlightenment. If you could attain enlightenment, then that state would have a beginning in time, and so it would not be true enlightenment.”

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Author:Ken Wilber
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“Rather, Spirit, and enlightement, has to be something that you are fully aware of right now. Something you are already looking at right now... We are all already looking directly at Spirit, we just don't recognize it. We have all the necessary cognition, but not the recognition.”

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Book:Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber
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“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.”

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Book:The Simple Feeling of Being: Visionary, Spiritual, and Poetic Writings
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“Great art grabs you, against your will, and then suspends your will. You are ushered into a quiet clearing, free of desire, free of grasping, free of ego, free of the self-contraction. And through that opening or clearing in your own awareness may come flashing higher truths, subtler revelations, profound connections. For a moment you might even touch eternity; who can say otherwise, when time itself is supendend in the clearing that great art creates in your awareness?”

MayArtSelfMomentsMightDesireAwarenessHigherQuietEgoConnectionsEternityProfoundOpeningRevelationsGreat ArtYou AgainGraspingClearingContractions
Author:Ken Wilber
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“One Taste is not some experience you bring about through effort; rather, it is the actual condition of all experience before you do anything to it. This uncontrived state is prior to effort, prior to grasping, prior to avoiding. It is the real world before you do anything to it, including the effort to "see it nondually".”

WorldRealStatesEffortConditionsTasteExperienceIncludingReal WorldAvoidingGrasping
Book:A Brief History of Everything
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“..I sought a world philosophy-or an integral philosophy-that would believably weave together the many pluralistic contexts of science, morals, aesthetics, Eastern as well as Western philosophy, and the world's great wisdom traditions. Not on the level of details-that is finitely impossible; but on the level of orienting generalizations: a way to suggest that the world really is one, undivided, whole, and related to itself in every way: a holistic philosophy for a holistic Kosmos, a plausible Theory of Everything.”

WorldWayWellsPhilosophyWholeTogetherLevelsMoralImpossibleTheoryTraditionWesternDetailsRelatedEasternAestheticsHolisticPlausibleGeneralizationGreat WisdomWestern Philosophy
Author:Ken Wilber
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“Subpersonalities can exist at different levels or memes, however, so that one can indeed have a purple subpersonality, a blue subpersonality, and so on. These often are context-triggered, so that one can have quite different types of moral responses, affects, needs, etc., in different situations.”

NeedsDifferentLevelsSituationMoralTypeBlueResponseEtcPurpleDifferent LevelsMemes
Book:A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality
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