67 Best Ken Wilber Quotes That Unlock Higher Thinking

1. “The point is to unify the opposites, both positive and negative, by discovering a ground which transcends and encompasses both.” – Ken Wilber

2. “I don’t believe that any human mind is capable of 100 percent error… Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.” – Ken Wilber

3. “The truth is an arbitrary, shifting, culturally relative, and historically molded phenomenon.” – Ken Wilber

4. “Between life’s stimuli and our habitual responses exists choice.” – Ken Wilber

5. “One’s sanctions for truth and goodness are established largely by individual preferences.” – Ken Wilber

6. “If you really want to change the world, you must first understand it adequately, or all you will do is reproduce in larger numbers your own ignorance.” – Ken Wilber

7. “There are spiritual patterns at work in the universe and these announce themselves with impressive regularity wherever human minds and hearts attempt to attune themselves to the cosmos in all its radiant dimensions.” – Ken Wilber

8. “Authentic spirituality… does not render the self content, it renders it undone.” – Ken Wilber

9. “I was slowly learning that love did not mean holding on, which I had always thought, but rather letting go.” – Ken Wilber

10. “There is intersubjectivity woven into the very fabric of the Kosmos at all levels.” – Ken Wilber

11. “Buddhist discipline is designed to transmute trishna, or egoic narcissism, into Karuna, Divine Narcissism; that is, to transmute self-love, which excludes love of others, into Self-love, which is love of others.” – Ken Wilber

12. “Spirit slumbers in nature, awakens in mind, and finally recognizes itself as Spirit in the transpersonal domains.” – Ken Wilber

13. “Most of us are only willing to call 5% of our present information into question any one point.” – Ken Wilber

14. “Boundary lines, of any type, are never found in the real world itself, but only in the imagination of the mapmakers.” – Ken Wilber

15. “Man lives on earth not once, but three times: the first stage of his life is continual sleep; the second, sleeping and waking by turns; the third, waking forever.” – Ken Wilber

16. “Do you even recognize your own consciousness?” – Ken Wilber

17. “There is a way out, but the way out is really a way within.” – Ken Wilber

18. “Some forms of truth are really forms of social power and oppression.” – Ken Wilber

19. “Global consciousness is not an objective belief that can be taught to anybody and everybody, but a subjective transformation in the interior structures that can hold belief in the first place, which itself is the product of a long line of inner consciousness development.” – Ken Wilber

20. “Nobody is smart enough to be wrong all the time.” – Ken Wilber

21. “The nondual universe of One Taste arises as a spontaneous gesture of your own true nature.” – Ken Wilber

22. “They most definitely and strongly believed that it is universally true that there is no universal truth.” – Ken Wilber

23. “She runs in my blood and beats in my heart; she is part of me, always, so I don’t have to picture her to remember her.” – Ken Wilber

24. “The adventure of awakening is among the most universal of human dramas.” – Ken Wilber

25. “If the soul wants to know God, it cannot do so in time. For so long as the soul is conscious of time or space or any other [object], it cannot know God.” – Ken Wilber

26. “In other words, this world is not a sin; forgetting that “this world” is the radiance and Goodness of Spirit—there is the sin.” – Ken Wilber

27. “There is nothing in the universe but matter.” – Ken Wilber

28. “Religion is just coded spirituality.” – Ken Wilber

29. “Be the most ethical, the most responsible, the most authentic you can be with every breath you take, because you are cutting a path into tomorrow that others will follow.” – Ken Wilber

30. “The idea was that the brain is part of nature, nature alone is real, so consciousness can be found in an empirical study of the brain—this is a horrible reduction to monological surfaces.” – Ken Wilber

31. “Let’s not forget that what is looking out of your eyes and hearing with your ears right now is already Spirit. And that Spirit, that I AMness, is always present in all sentient beings.” – Ken Wilber

32. “To understand the whole it is necessary to understand the parts. To understand the parts, it is necessary to understand the whole. Such is the circle of understanding.” – Ken Wilber

33. “Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9% of everything you think, And everything you do, Is for your self, And there isn’t one.” – Ken Wilber

34. “Freedom is an endless meeting.” – Ken Wilber

35. “Increasing consciousness = increasing complexity.” – Ken Wilber

36. “Eternity is not ever-lasting time but the real, unfading, indestructible, and timeless Present, for, as Schroedinger said, the present is the only thing that has no end.” – Ken Wilber

37. “You can’t have good without evil, pleasure without pain, and so on.” – Ken Wilber

38. “Start as a human being in this culture, toss in madness, toss in mystical states, toss in being gay, toss in being HIV-positive, toss in religion that assures you God hates you for all of that – and then look me in the eye and tell me you can feel ok about yourself. I dare you. I just dare you.” – Ken Wilber

39. “Few of us have lost our minds, but most of us have long ago lost our bodies.” – Ken Wilber

40. “Meditation was invented as a way for the soul to venture inward, there ultimately to find supreme identity with Godhead. Whatever else it does, and it does many beneficial things, meditation is first and foremost a search for the God within.” – Ken Wilber

41. “I rise to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today.” – Ken Wilber

42. “You are not the one who experiences liberation; you are the clearing, the opening, the emptiness, in which any experience comes and goes, like reflections on the mirror. And you are the mirror, the mirror mind, and not any experienced reflection.” – Ken Wilber

43. “I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody – including me – has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace.” – Ken Wilber

44. “I don’t have to agree with everything you say, but I should attempt at least to understand it, for the opposite of mutual understanding is, quite simply, war.” – Ken Wilber

45. “You cannot have exterior development without interior development to hold it in place.” – Ken Wilber

46. “This present moment, since it knows neither past nor future, is itself timeless, and that which is timeless is Eternal. Thus “the eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.” – Ken Wilber

47. “The truth will not necessarily set you free, but truthfulness will.” – Ken Wilber

48. “Real love will take you far beyond yourself; and therefore real love will devastate you.” – Ken Wilber

49. “Was it someone else? Was it not you yourself?” – Ken Wilber

50. “I’m not nearly the saint some of my fans imagine and I’m nowhere near the devil my detractors wish, so you simply take both of those with a grain of salt.” – Ken Wilber

51. “The beauty of practice is that it transforms us so that we outgrow our original intentions – and keep going! Our motivations for practicing evolve as we mature.” – Ken Wilber

52. “A full-spectrum approach to human consciousness and behavior means that men and women have available to them a spectrum of knowing -a spectrum that includes, at the very least, the eye of flesh, the eye of mind, and the eye of spirit.” – Ken Wilber

53. “Physics is the most fundamental, and least significant, of the sciences.” – Ken Wilber

54. “I had my own test, better than Turing’s: when a computer could genuinely convince me that it wanted to commit suicide.” – Ken Wilber

55. “The cure for the disaster of modernity is to address the dissociation, not attempt to erase the differentiation!” – Ken Wilber

56. “In Democracy, man exploits man; in Communism, it’s the other way round.” – Ken Wilber

57. “Truth, in the broadest sense, means being attuned with the real. To be authentically in touch with the true, and the good and the beautiful. Yes?” – Ken Wilber

58. “The more I go into I, the more I fall out of I.” – Ken Wilber

59. “Authentic spirituality is revolutionary. It does not legitimate the world, it breaks the world; it does not console the world, it shatters it. And it does not render the self content, it renders it undone.” – Ken Wilber

60. “Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are not signs of mental illness, but of growing intelligence.” – Ken Wilber

61. “What is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It’s not the spirit in you, since that is already enlightened, and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher.” – Ken Wilber

62. “Becoming a leader is the same as becoming a fully integrated human being,” – Ken Wilber

63. “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.” – Ken Wilber

64. “Love is a time-honored way to transcend the separate-self sense and leap into the sublime; Treya and I held hands, closed our eyes, and jumped.” – Ken Wilber

65. “Man, the mask of God,” – Ken Wilber

66. “Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress – in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news.” – Ken Wilber

67. “The basic idea of integral transformative practice (ITP) is simple: the more aspects of our being that we simultaneously exercise, the more likely that transformation will occur.” – Ken Wilber

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