One Taste Quotes

“And therefore, all of those for whom authentic transformation has deeply unseated their souls must, I believe, wrestle with the profound moral obligation to shout form the heart—perhaps quietly and gently, with tears of reluctance; perhaps with fierce fire and angry wisdom; perhaps with slow and careful analysis; perhaps by unshakable public example—but authentically always and absolutely carries a a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you.
Alas, if you fail to do so, you are betraying your own authenticity. You are hiding your true estate. You don’t want to upset others because you don’t want to upset your self. You are acting in bad faith, the taste of a bad infinity.

Because, you see, the alarming fact is that any realization of depth carries a terrible burden: those who are allowed to see are simultaneously saddled with the obligation to communicate that vision in no uncertain terms: that is the bargain. You were allowed to see the truth under the agreement that you would communicate it to others (that is the ultimate meaning of the bodhisattva vow). And therefore, if you have seen, you simply must speak out. Speak out with compassion, or speak out with angry wisdom, or speak out with skillful means, but speak out you must.
And this is truly a terrible burden, a horrible burden, because in any case there is no room for timidity. The fact that you might be wrong is simply no excuse: You might be right in your communication, and you might be wrong, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter, as Kierkegaard so rudely reminded us, is that only by investing and speaking your vision with passion, can the truth, one way or another, finally penetrate the reluctance of the world. If you are right, or if you are wrong, it is only your passion that will force either to be discovered. It is your duty to promote that discovery—either way—and therefore it is your duty to speak your truth with whatever passion and courage you can find in your heart. You must shout, in whatever way you can.”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“When most people are happy, it’s not really fun until you can share it with someone, especially someone you love, a mate or a friend.”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“Anytime a sage displays humanness—in regard to money, food, sex, relationships—we are shocked, shocked, because we are planning to escape life altogether, not live it, and the sage who lives life offends us.”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“authenticity always and absolutely carries a demand and duty: you must speak out, to the best of your ability, and shake the spiritual tree, and shine your headlights into the eyes of the complacent. You must let that radical realization rumble through your veins and rattle those around you.”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“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, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“Suffering is not just “negative”; it is a bond through which we all touch each other. Suffering, truly, is the first grace. Dear”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“It is, of course, simply another name for narcissism. Whatever my problems, they do not stem from me. They stem from the Other, who is the Bad Guy always. The real travesty here is that the cases of true oppression—a genuine case of a woman, a gay, a black, an Indian, a white male, getting held back due solely to ethnocentric or group prejudice—those cases lose all their urgency because they are drowned out by a thousand other voices all screaming oppression to explain even the most trivial and often unavoidable disappointments of life. So”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“That is, my experience is that when the bodymind is strong and healthy—not ascetically starved and despised—it is all the easier to drop it, transcend it, let it go.”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“I saw only the glory of green emeralds, and radiant buddhas walking everywhere, and there was no I to see any of this, but the emeralds were there just the same.”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“This profoundly disturbed me, because I had had several kensho or satori-like experiences (glimpses of One Taste), but they were all generally confined to the waking state.”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“And so now, today, one cannot think of the greats—Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Marx, Fichte, Freud, Nietzsche, Einstein, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Schelling—the whole Germanic sphere—without thinking, at some point, of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Sobibor and Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Chelmno. My God, they have names, as if they were human.”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“Fame in this country is a religion that demands human sacrifice, a religion to which I do not wish to belong. You start to take yourself so seriously—I saw it happening to me, after I had written my first book at the age of 23. I’d give lectures or seminars, people would tell me how amazingly great I was, and sooner or later, you believe them. You end up exactly with what Oscar Levant said to George Gershwin: “Tell me, George, if you had it to do all over again, would you still fall in love with yourself?” After”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“But two, religion has also served—in a usually very, very small minority—the function of radical transformation and liberation. This function of religion does not fortify the separate self, but utterly shatters it—not consolation but devastation, not entrenchment but emptiness, not complacency but explosion, not comfort but revolution—in short, not a conventional bolstering of consciousness but a radical transmutation and transformation at the deepest seat of consciousness itself.”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“BELL HOOKS: “I’m so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer. I think the worst thing that can happen to us is to lose sight of the power of empathy and compassion.” MAYA”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“The fundamental message is self-righteous, and it takes this form: ‘T. S. Eliot is a homophobe and I am not. Therefore, I am a better person than Eliot.’ To which the proper response is: ‘But T. S. Eliot could really write, and you can’t.”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality

“You have to know that there actually is a transcendental something, if you are going to free anybody from anything—if there is no beyond-the-given, there is no freedom from the given, and liberation is futile.”
― Ken Wilber, One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality