ISBN # I-57062-379-I Shambala Publications Order Here
Ever since the publication of his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, written when he was twenty-three, Ken Wilber has been identified as the most comprehensive philosophical thinker of our times. This introductory sampler, designed to acquaint newcomers with his work, contains brief passages from his most popular books, ranging over a variety of topics, including levels of consciousness, mystical experience, meditation practice, death, the perennial philosophy, and Wilber's integral approach to reality, integrating matter, mind, body, soul, and spirit. Here is Wilber's writting at its most reader-friendly, discussing essential ideas of the world's great psychological, philosophical, and spritual traditions in a language that is lucid, engaging, and inspirational.
Ken Wilber is the author of over a dozen books, including No Boundary; Grace and Grit; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; A Brief History of Everything; and The Marage of Sence and Soul.
My book Quantum Questions centered on the remarkable fact that virtually every one of the great pioneers of modern physics-men like Albert Einstein and Schrodinger and Heisenberg-were spiritual mystics of one sort or another, an altogether extraordinary situation. The hardest of sciences, physics, had run smack into the tenderest of religions, mysticisim. Why? And what exactly was mysticism anyway?
So I collected the writings of Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Louis de Broglie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli, Sir Arthur Eddington, and Sir James Jeans. The Scientific genius of these men is beyond dispute (all but two were Nobel laureates); what is so amazing, as I said, is that they all shared a profoundly spiritual or mystical worldview, which is perhaps the last thing one would expect from pioneering scientists.
the essence of mysticism is that in the deepest part of your own being, in the very center of your own pure awareness, you are fundamentally one with Spirit, one with Godhead, one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and unchanging fassion. Sound far out? Listen to Erwin Schrodinger, Nobel Prize-winning cofounder of modern quantum mechanics:
"It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling, and choice that you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather, this knowledge, feeling, and choise are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay, in all sensitive beings...Inconceivable as it seems to ordinary reason, you-and all other conscious beings as such-are all in all. Hence this life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire exsistence, but is, in a certain sense, the whole...This is that sacred, mystic formula which is so simple and so clear: 'I am in the east and in the west, I am above and below, I am this whole world.'
"Thus you can throw yourself on the ground, strech out upon Mother Earth, with the certain conviction that you are one with her and she with you. You are as firmly established, as invulnerable, as she-indeed, a thousand times firmer and more invulnerable. As surely as she will engulf you tomorrow, so surely will she bring you forth anew. And not merely 'someday': now, today, every day she is bringing you forth, not once, but thousands upon thousands of times, just as every day she engulfs you a thousand times over. For eternally and always there is only now, one and the same now; the present is the only thing that has no end"[Quantum Questions: 97]
According to the mystics, when we go beyond or transcend our seperate-self sense, our limited ego, we discover instead a Supreme Identity, an identity with the All, with universal Spirit, infinite and all-prevading, eternal and unchanging. As Einstein explains: "A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'universe'; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something seperate from the rest-a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison."
Indeed, the