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Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber Quotes

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Famous Ken Wilber Quotes

“Art is a window to The Infinite, and opening to the goddess, a portal through which you and I, with the help of the artist, may discover depths and heights of our soul undreamed of by the vulgar world. Art is the eye of the spirit, through which the sublime can reach down to us, and we up to it, and be transformed, transfigured in the process.”

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Author:Ken Wilber
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“All sentient beings - all holons in fact - contain Buddha-nature - contain depth, consciousness, intrinsic value, Spirit - and thus we are all members of the council of all beings... And the ultimate objective truth is that all beings are perfect manifestations of Spirit or Emptiness”

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Book:The Essential Ken Wilber
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“The point of the overall meditative path is to have Wakefulness (or Consciousness as Such) transcend and include all state-realms, so it ceases to "black out" or "forget" various changes of state (such as dreaming and deep sleep), and instead recognizes a "constant Consciousness" or ever-present nondual Awareness, the union (and transcendence) of individual finite self and infinite Spirit.”

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Book:The Fourth Turning: Imagining the Evolution of an Integral Buddhism
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“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.”

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Author:Ken Wilber
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“Conscious business.. business that is conscious of inner and outer worlds.. would therefore be business that takes into account body, mind, and spirit in self, culture, and nature. Put differently, conscious business would be mindful of the way that the spectrum of consciousness operates in the Big Three worlds of self and culture and nature.”

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Author:Ken Wilber
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“Bad Gardens copy, good gardens create, great gardens transcend. What all great gardens have in common are their ability to pull the sensitive viewer out of him or herself and into the garden, so completely that the separate self-sense disappears entirely, and at least for a brief moment one is ushered into a nondual and timeless awareness. A great garden, in other words, is mystical no matter what its actual content.”

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Author:Ken Wilber
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“Perhaps the best place to begin with an integral approach to business is with.. oneself. In the Big Three of self, culture, and world, integral mastery starts with self. How do body and mind and spirit operate in me? How does that necessarily impact my role in the world of business? And how can I become more conscious of these already operating realities in myself and in others?”

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Author:Ken Wilber
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“Were you somebody different a thousand years ago? Will you be somebody different a thousand years from now? What is this One Self that is forever your own deepest being? Must you believe the lies of time? Must you swallow the insanity that One Spirit does not exist? Can you show me your Original Face, of which there is One and Only One in all the entire World?”

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Book:One Taste
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“The great and secret message of the experiential mystics the world over is that, with the eye of contemplation, Spirit can be seen. With the eye of contemplation, the great Within radiantly unfolds. And in all cases, the eye with which you see God is the same eye with which God sees you: the eye of contemplation.”

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Book:The Simple Feeling of Being: Visionary, Spiritual, and Poetic Writings
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“The Realization of the Nondual traditions is uncompromising: There is only Spirit, there is only God, there is only Emptiness in all its radiant wonder. All the good and all the evil, the very best and the very worst, the upright and the degenerate- each and all are radically perfect manifestations of Spirit precisely as they are. There is nothing but God, nothing but the Goddess, nothing but Spirit in all directions, and not a grain of sand, not a speck of dust, is more or less Spirit than any other.”

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Book:The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad
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“"Transcending the ego" thus actually means to transcend but include the ego in a deeper and higher embrace, first in the soul or deeper psychic, then with the Witness or primordial Self, then with each previous stage taken up, enfolded, included, and embraced in the radiance of One Taste. And that means we do not "get rid" of the small ego, but rahter, we inhabit it fully, live it with verve, use it as the necessary vehicle through which higher truths are communicated. Soul and Spirit include body, emotions, and mind; they do not erase them.”

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Author:Ken Wilber
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“Evolution occurs in the world of time and space and form, whereas Spirit's primordial nature is finally timeless and Formless, prior to the of evolution but not other to it. We do not find Spirit or Emptiness by reaching some evolutionary Omega point in time, but rather by stepping off the cycle of time and evolution altogether (or ceasing to contract into it).”

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Book:The Eye of Spirit: An Integral Vision for a World Gone Slightly Mad
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“The very desire to seek spiritual enlightenment is in fact nothing but the grasping tendency of the ego itself, and thus the very search for enlightenment prevents it. The 'perfect practice' is therefore not to search for enlightenment but to inquire into the motive for seeking itself. You obviously seek in order to avoid the present, and yet the present alone holds the answer: to seek forever is to miss the point forever. You always already are enlightened Spirit, and therefore to seek Spirit is simply to deny Spirit.”

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Author:Ken Wilber
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“But the fundamentalists, the "creationists," seize upon these vacancies in the scientific hotel to pack the conferences with their delegates. They see the opening-creativity is an absolute-and they equate that absolute with their mythic god, and they stuff this god with all the characteristics that promote their own egoic inclinations, starting with the fact that if you don't believe in this particular god, you fry in hell forever, which is not exactly a generous view of Spirit.”

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Book:A Brief History of Everything
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“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.”

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Book:A Brief History of Everything
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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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“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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