"Read everything he writes. It will change your life."
- Deepak Chopra
Stirred doesn't quite describe what happened, shaken is more like how I felt, an almost rude awakening. And the shaker?
On a typical day he gets up between 3 and 5 in the morning in his house overlooking the mountains around Boulder, Colorado. After an hour or two of meditation he works until early afternoon. This is followed by an hour of weightlifting to keep him grounded in his body. The afternoons are for chores, and after a meal around 5 pm, he spends his time watching a movie, visiting friends and reading something light. In the biography Thought as Passion on the life of Ken Wilber, Frank Visser wrote in that the world-renowned philosopher leads a disciplined life.
Listening to Wilber give his 4-day interview on Kosmic Consciousness to Tami Simon of Sounds True, I heard a master story teller clarifying profound dimensions of science and spirituality with ease and empathy, always speaking in a light-hearted manner full of jests about himself and his accomplishments. Discipline remains invisible below the surface.
Over the past four decades, Wilber's integral philosophy has changed the lives of millions of people. He is quoted by www.integrallife.com as the internationally acknowledged leader and preeminent scholar of the Integral stage of human development, which continues to gather momentum around the world, and as the most widely translated academic writer in America, with his 25 books translated in some 30 languages. He has also been called one of the most controversial and profound thinkers of our age, and is the first psychologist-philosopher in history to have his collected works published while still alive, and at the time he was only 48.
Behind the success and smooth presentation of philosopher and story teller Ken Wilber lies a fascinating and inspirational story of determination to overcome challenges.
After trading in an all-American image and dropping out of Duke university, Wilber took a job as dishwasher to support himself in writing his first books in the seventies. He talks about a personal transition and decision to “get into interior growth”, and then experiencing a strong burst of it. After graduating from another university, his first book at the age of 23 became the foundation of what was later to become his integral theory. However, The Spectrum of Consciousness, after completion in 1973, was only published in 1977 after having been turned down by numerous publishers.
Once published, the book made him famous overnight as a leading thinker in the fields of psychology and philosophy. To write the book, he had labored in thought for three years while doing his manual job, and worked on reading and research for about ten months, wrote Visser. This was followed by a month or more of tortuous 15-hour bouts of typing, supported by a gallon of milk and naps on the sofa.
In later years, Wilber kept up his production of books with ever wider scope of application, and spent more and more of his working life in self-imposed isolation, serving time in solitary research and writing supported by a vast collection of books and videos.
Interspersed with these productive years were periods where Wilber was forced to deal with intense personal challenges, which led to pauses in his writing. Talking about the years of caring for his partner Treya Killam Wilber, who died of cancer in 1989, he remarked that “the pain, terror, agony was so horrible – either you really just committed suicide or come out on the other side, with a quantum leap in growth.”
The suffering was further complicated as he found himself affected by a little-known enzyme deficiency disease that crippled his work for while. Talking with Tami Simon about these periods of affliction, he said that “if you’re lucky enough to deal with them, you can accelerate growth, and if not, you can really go to hell.” In retrospect, he considered this time to be the most important transformative period in his life.
After passing through these dark valleys, he resumed his writing and shared what he had learned through these tribulations in Grace and Grit, which was published in 1991 and attracted many new readers.
Wilber encountered further torment at key stages in the development of his integral theory. The birth of his masterpiece Sex, Ecology and Spirituality in the mid 1990s was intense, he told Tami Simon, and the subsequent period involved a trying period of “dying to my own Ken Wilberness.” Later he would suffer frustrating flare-ups of the enzyme deficiency disease, causing a down-period of more than half a year.
He is remarkably transparent about the evolution of his integral theory, and how he made corrections in later years to his earlier model. In his interview with Tami Simon he describes these periods of retrospection and failing forward as extremely hard and disturbing emotionally and physically, and “plutonium intense.”
While his books map out what seem to be continuously positive evolutionary paths (and spirals) of development from pre-personal to personal, trans-personal and nondual stages, he doesn’t restrict himself to a positive lens. Instead, he underlines that each evolutionary stage actually comes with new challenges and chances to mess it up on an ever grander scale, individually and as societies.
Interspersed with these productive years were periods where Wilber was forced to deal with intense personal challenges, which led to pauses in his writing. Talking about the years of caring for his partner Treya Killam Wilber, who died of cancer in 1989, he remarked that “the pain, terror, agony was so horrible – either you really just committed suicide or come out on the other side, with a quantum leap in growth.”
The suffering was further complicated as he found himself affected by a little-known enzyme deficiency disease that crippled his work for while. Talking with Tami Simon about these periods of affliction, he said that “if you’re lucky enough to deal with them, you can accelerate growth, and if not, you can really go to hell.” In retrospect, he considered this time to be the most important transformative period in his life.
After passing through these dark valleys, he resumed his writing and shared what he had learned through these tribulations in Grace and Grit, which was published in 1991 and attracted many new readers.
Wilber encountered further torment at key stages in the development of his integral theory. The birth of his masterpiece Sex, Ecology and Spirituality in the mid 1990s was intense, he told Tami Simon, and the subsequent period involved a trying period of “dying to my own Ken Wilberness.” Later he would suffer frustrating flare-ups of the enzyme deficiency disease, causing a down-period of more than half a year.
He is remarkably transparent about the evolution of his integral theory, and how he made corrections in later years to his earlier model. In his interview with Tami Simon he describes these periods of retrospection and failing forward as extremely hard and disturbing emotionally and physically, and “plutonium intense.”
While his books map out what seem to be continuously positive evolutionary paths (and spirals) of development from pre-personal to personal, trans-personal and nondual stages, he doesn’t restrict himself to a positive lens. Instead, he underlines that each evolutionary stage actually comes with new challenges and chances to mess it up on an ever grander scale, individually and as societies.
Hence, he explains, we experience not only breakthroughs in health, education, economic development and spiritual empowerment, but also Auschwitz, continued destructive wars, 9/11, environmental degradation, and global warming.
To deal with these choices and challenges that the evolution of human consciousness brings, he underlines the importance of will and personal discipline in a recent interview on the website of the Integral Institute he founded with friends. “To have some muscle to exercise your will, your volition, your capacity to make these choices in the midst of what reality hands you, is absolutely crucial. Since we have so little emphasis on discipline and will, basically you're just at the mercy of your whichever will speaks loudest.” Wisdom grown from personal experience and choices, no doubt.
I was first introduced to Ken Wilber and his philosophy by my teacher Jim Paredes during the Tapping the Creative Universe workshop in Manila in 2003. However it took until this year for me to get immersed in Wilber’s integral theory and to explore its meaning for my life and work.
As Wilber explains about his now-famous 4 quadrants of the subjective “I”, the objective “It”, the intersubjective “We”, and the interobjective “Its,” it is all too easy to limit oneself to live in any one of these four perspectives. Reading integral theory should therefore not remain an exercise in the objective realm of “It”, so I started my own travel into the subjective interior by reading and listening about Wilber’s trials and tribulations on his own internal journey to “integral.” I have also started involving others around me in exploring integral theory, to allow me explore “We” dimensions together with them.
Of my integral journey so far, I found Wilber’s mountain-top views breathtaking, and I am most impressed, indeed shaken, by the example of his own travels and the part that discipline and will have played in the life of this master storyteller.
Deepak Chopra was right to say that reading Wilber can change your life. I keep reading him.
Photograph: Balloon over Flanders.
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