Sex, Ecology, Spirituality Quotes

“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, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“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, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“The postmodern poststructuralists go from saying “there is no final perspective” (or “perspectives are boundless”) to saying “therefore there is no advantage in any perspective over another.” This leveling of perspectives is not an interrelation of all perspectives but is itself merely one particular and covertly privileged perspective (and thus ends up, as we have seen, being perfectly self-contradictory: there is no advantaged perspective except mine, which maintains that all other perspectives are not so privileged).”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“the Many returning to and embracing the One is Good, and is known as wisdom; the One returning to and embracing the Many is Goodness, and is known as compassion.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“And Habermas: mutual understanding in unrestrained communicative action unfolded by rationality is the omega point of individual and social evolution itself.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“It marshals a vast amount of scientific evidence, from physics to biology, and offers extensive arguments, all geared to objectively proving the holistic nature of the universe. It fails to see that if we take a bunch of egos with atomistic concepts and teach them that the universe is holistic, all we will actually get is a bunch of egos with holistic concepts. Precisely because this monological approach, with its unskillful interpretation of an otherwise genuine intuition, ignores or neglects the “I” and the “we” dimensions, it doesn’t understand very well the exact nature of the inner transformations that are necessary in the first place in order to be able to find an identity that embraces the manifest All. Talk about the All as much as we want, nothing fundamentally changes.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“As we said, Zen masters talk about Emptiness all the time! But they have a practice and a methodology (zazen) which allows them to discover the transcendental referent via their own developmental signified, and thus their words (the signifiers) remain grounded in experiential, reproducible, fallibilist criteria.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“When we love a person, we love all that belongs to him; we extend to the children the affection we feel for the parent. Now every Soul is a daughter of the [Godhead]. How can this world be separated from the spiritual world? Those who despise what is so nearly akin to the spiritual world, prove that they know nothing of the spiritual world, except in name. .”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“the hand of death touches every love that the Descenders profess for all and sundry, tears also streaming down the face with “compassion” written all over it.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“Not in Emptiness, but as Emptiness, I am released from the fate of a never-ending addition of parts, and I stand free as the Source and Suchness of the glorious display. I taste the sky and swallow whole the Kosmos, and nothing is added to me; I disappear in a million forms and nothing is subtracted; I rise as the sun to greet my own day, and nothing moves at all.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“Turtles all the way up, all the way down. What deconstruction puts into question is the desire to find a final resting place, in either wholeness or partness or anything in between. Every time somebody finds a final interpretation or a foundational interpretation of a text (or life or history or Kosmos), deconstruction is on hand to say that the total context—or Wholistic interpretation—does not exist, because it is also unendingly a part of yet another text forever. As Culler puts it, “Total context [final Wholism] is unmasterable, both in principle and in practice. Meaning is context bound, but context is boundless.”8 Transfinite turtles.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“In this regard, the pure Ego or pure Self is virtually identical with what the Hindus call Atman (or the pure Witness that itself is never witnessed—is never an object—but contains all objects in itself).”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“The “Higher Self” camp is notoriously immune to social concerns. Everything that happens to one is said to be “one’s own choice”—the hyper-agentic Higher Self is responsible for everything that happens—this is the monological and totally disengaged Ego gone horribly amok in omnipotent self-only fantasies. This simply represses the networks of communions that are just as important as agency in constituting the manifestation of Spirit. This is not Eros; this is Phobos—a withdrawal from social engagement and intersubjective action. All of this totally overlooks the fact that Spirit manifests not only as Self (I) but as intersubjective Community (We) and as an objective State of Affairs (It)—as Buddha, Sangha, Dharma—each inseparably interwoven with the others and interwoven in the Good and the Goodness of the All.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“The belief in the sanctity of one’s idiosyncrasy—especially if it be a group idiosyncrasy, and therefore sustained and intensified by mutual flattery—is rapidly converted into a belief in its superiority. More”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“In understandably wishing to increase freedom and liberty, it paradoxically left massive road kill everywhere on the highway to rational heaven.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“that which one can deviate from is not the true Tao.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“Thus, he says, those who would “eliminate from the universe” what they think of as “inferior beings” would simply “eliminate Providence itself,” whose nature it is to “produce all things and to diversify all in the manner of their existence.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“one of the first steps toward an integral postmodernity is the development and establishment of a genuine environmental ethics, or a moral and ethical stance to nonhuman holons.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“If we see the biologically differentiated roles of men and women as something imposed by men on women, then we to simultaneously assume the complete pigification of and the total sheepification of women. To automatically assume that differentiation of roles is the result of domination is to automatically define a particular group as victim, which automatically and irrevocably disempowers that group in the very attempt to liberate it.”
― Ken Wilberlber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“even as it surreptitiously dipped into that dimension for its own hidden judgments, judgments which it forcefully and vehemently made and then flat-out denied making. “Empirical knowledge alone is true knowledge”—and where is the empirical proof for that?”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“The noosphere, not the biosphere, would determine rights and responsibilities. And these rights were not previously repressed, they were previously meaningless (they were not oppressed, they had simply not yet emerged).”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“Oppression as a causal explanation is deficient and inadequate in almost every respect, since, among other things, it simply does not fit the data curve. “These oppression theories,” says Chafetz, “are based on vaguely defined concepts often ill suited to operationalization, such as ‘patriarchy,’ ‘female subordination,’ and ‘sexism.’ The use of such emotion-laden but unclear terms, combined typically with a heavily normative approach to the topic of sex inequality, results in a maximum of rhetoric but a minimum of clear insight.” No, this polarization of the sexes—with males dominating the public/productive sphere and females dominating the private/reproductive, to the detriment of both—has virtually nothing to do with male oppression and female sheepdom/subjugation. It has everything to do with life in the biosphere.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution

“starting with the Renaissance and running through the Enlightenment, there occurred what we might call “the great reversal.” Suddenly, very suddenly, the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in—and the transition was bloody, arguably the bloodiest cognitive transformation in European history.”
― Ken Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution