The Pocket Ken Wilber by Ken Wilber

Author:Ken Wilber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Shambhala

4

PASSIONATE WORDS

In the following selections, Wilber as spiritual philosopher engages the most learned academics and enlightened sages by weaving humanity’s intellectual and spiritual history into a grand integral tapestry. As a result of being inundated with technical terms from countless academic disciplines, Wilber has created a common language through which all subject areas can communicate with each other. At its best, passionate philosophy—passionate words—is not merely an intellectual transmission from one mind to another. Rather, it shakes the very core of your being.

Never does Wilber shy away from the humanity behind the thoughts—both the darkest shadows of our animal nature and the brilliant light of our divine potential. The world’s collective knowledge—at all levels of depth—is included and expressed through the lens of vision-logic, which recognizes the holistic patterns and core links that fuel the integral vision. A philosophical adrenaline rush comes from discovering an utterly stunning unity within an ocean of diversity.

TO HAVE any meaning at all, philosophy must sizzle with passion, boil your brain, fry your eyeballs, or you’re just not doing it right. And that applies to the other end of the spectrum of feelings as well. Real philosophy is as gentle as fog and as quiet as tears; it holds the world as if it were a delicate infant, raw and open and vulnerable. I sincerely hope that if I have brought anything to this field, it is a bit of passion. . . .

The one thing I do know, and that I would like to emphasize, is that any integral theory is just that—a mere theory. I am always surprised, or rather shocked, at the common perception that I am recommending an intellectual approach to spirituality, when that is the opposite of my view. Just because an author writes, say, a history of dancing, does not mean that the author is advocating that people stop dancing and merely read about it instead. I have written academic treatises that cover areas such as spirituality and its relation to a larger scheme of things, but my recommendation is always that people take up an actual spiritual practice, rather than merely read about it. An integral approach to dancing says, take up dancing itself, and sure, read a book about it, too. Do both, but in any event, don’t merely read the book. That’s like taking a vacation to Bermuda by sitting at home and looking through a book of maps. My books are maps, but please, go to Bermuda and see for yourself.

Foreword to Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion by Frank Visser, pp. XII–XIV

MEN AND WOMEN, as the Christian mystics are fond of saying, have (at least) three eyes of knowing: the eye of flesh, which apprehends physical events; the eye of mind, which apprehends images and desires and concepts and ideas; and the eye of contemplation, which apprehends spiritual experiences and states. And that, of course, is a simplified version of the spectrum of consciousness, reaching from body to mind to spirit.

CW 7: The Eye of

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.