Integral Psychology Quotes

“this regard, a hotly disputed topic is whether the spiritual/transpersonal stages themselves can be conceived as higher levels of cognitive development. The answer, I have suggested, depends on what you mean by “cognitive.” If you mean what most Western psychologists mean—which is a mental conceptual knowledge of exterior objects—then no, higher or spiritual stages are not mental cognition, because they are often supramental, transconceptual, and nonexterior. If by “cognitive” you mean “consciousness in general,” including superconscious states, then much of higher spiritual experience is indeed cognitive.”
― Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy

“Every objective occasion has subjective and intersubjective components; every holon has four quadrants. The world is not merely an objective, Right-Hand occasion—it also has intrinsic depth, consciousness, the within, the interior, the Left-Hand worlds in all their glory. Constructivism means consciousness doesn’t merely reflect the world, it helps construct it. Contextualism means that holons are nested, indefinitely. Integral-aperspectivism means that as many perspectives as humanly possible must be included in an integral embrace. That the Kosmos is endlessly holonic—there is the message of postmodernism.”
― Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy

“Where perspectival reason privileges the exclusive perspective of the particular subject, vision-logic adds up all the perspectives, privileging none, and thus attempts to grasp the integral, the whole, the multiple contexts within contexts that endlessly disclose the Kosmos, not in a rigid or absolutist fashion, but in a fluidly holonic and multidimensional tapestry.”
― Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy

“Left-Hand or interior events cannot be seen in that fashion. You cannot see love, envy, wonder, compassion, insight, intentionality, spiritual illumination, states of consciousness, value, or meaning running around out there in the empirical world. Interior events are not seen in an exterior or objective manner, they are seen by introspection and interpretation”
― Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy

“The typical, well-meaning liberal approach to solving social tensions is to treat every value as equal, and then try to force a leveling or redistribution of resources (money, rights, goods, land) while leaving the values untouched. The typical conservative approach is take its particular values and try to foist them on everybody else. The developmental approach is to realize that there are many different values and worldviews; that some are more complex than others; that many of the problems at one stage of development can only be defused by evolving to a higher level; and that only by recognizing and facilitating this evolution can social justice be finally served.”
― Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy

“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, Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy

“In this regard, a hotly disputed topic is whether the spiritual/transpersonal stages themselves can be conceived as higher levels of cognitive development. The answer, I have suggested, depends on what you mean by “cognitive.”
― Ken Wilber, Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy