A Brief History of Everything Quotes

“The truth will not necessarily set you free, but truthfulness will.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“The whole game is undone, this nightmare of evolution, and you are exactly where you were prior to the beginning of the whole show. With a sudden shock of the utterly obvious, you recognize your own Original Face, the face you had prior to the Big Bang, the face of utter Emptiness that smiles as all creation and sings as the entire Kosmos—and it is all undone in that primal glance, and all that is left is the smile, and the reflection of the moon on a quiet pond, late on a crystal clear night.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“El dios, o la diosa, del capitalismo, del marxismo, del industrialismo, de la ecología profunda, del consumismo o del ecofeminismo es el dios de lo que puede verse con los ojos, percibirse con los sentidos, registrarse con los sentimientos o venerarse con las sensaciones, un dios al que puede hincarse el diente y que se agota en las formas.”
― Ken Wilber, Breve historia de todas las cosas (Sabiduría perenne)

“The point is that a holon responds, and can respond, only to those stimuli that fall within its worldspace, its worldview. Everything else is nonexistent.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“In one sense—and this sounds a little hyper-sentimental—but from one angle almost every moment strikes me that way—the sheer Mystery of existence itself, the sheer and ultimate unknowability of everything, makes every moment a “holy-shit-how-did-this-happen?” moment. I’m certainly known as a philosopher, but what really strikes me the most is not the knowability of each moment, but the sheer unknowability of each moment—the magical Mystery tour of our entire trajectory—it’s awesome, amazing, unbelievable, miraculous, and completely unknowable in the last analysis—what the Christian mystics call “divine ignorance” and Zen calls “don’t-know mind”—those words are applying to the ultimate Reality! An integral approach is not a way to know it all, but to try to include in what we know as much as is humanly possible, because the only way to know anything about this ultimate Mystery is to know as much as we humanly can—the less we leave out, the more Mystery we embrace. It’s like Socrates is credited with saying: the more you know, the more unknowable you realize it all is (Socrates was said to be the wisest man alive because he realized he knew nothing at all). So every moment is a type of “holy-shit!” moment—that anything is happening at all is just miraculous, totally holy-shit miraculous.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“So, to answer your question specifically, Schelling could integrate Ego and Eco—Fichte and Spinoza, autonomy and wholeness—because, he pointed out, when you realize your supreme identity as Spirit, then you are autonomous in the fullest sense—because nothing is outside you—and therefore you are also whole or unified in the fullest sense—because nothing is outside you. Full autonomy and full wholeness are one and the same thing in the supreme identity. So men and women don’t have to sacrifice their own autonomy or will because their will ultimately aligns itself with the entire Kosmos. The entire Kosmos is something your deepest Self is doing, and you are that Kosmos in its entirety. Full autonomy, full wholeness. This is a profound integration of Ego and Eco, of Ascent and Descent, of transcendence and immanence, of Spirit descending into even the lowest state and ascending back to itself, but with Spirit nonetheless fully present at each and every stage as the process of its own self-realization, a divine play of Spirit present in every single movement of the Kosmos, yet finding more and more of itself as its own Play proceeds, dancing fully and divine in every gesture of the universe, never really lost and never really found, but present from the start and all along, a wink and a nod from the radiant Abyss.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“The idea was that the brain is part of nature, nature alone is real, so consciousness can be found in an empirical study of the brain—this is a horrible reduction to monological surfaces.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“The mythic god is the god of a particular peoples—it is sociocentric and ethnocentric, not postconventional and worldcentric”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“Wisdom sees that the Many is One, and Compassion sees that the One is the Many. Or in the East: Prajna sees that Form is Emptiness, Karuna sees that Emptiness is Form.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“With Spirit’s shocking Self-recognition, Forms continue to arise and evolve, but the secret is out: they are all Forms of Emptiness in the universe of One Taste, endlessly transparent and utterly Divine. There is no end limit, no foundation, no final resting place, only Emptiness and endless Grace. So the luminous Play carries on with insanely joyous regard, timeless gesture to timeless gesture, radiant in its wild release, ecstatic in its perfect abandon, endless fullness beyond endless fullness, this miraculously self-liberating Dance, and there is no one anywhere to watch it, or even sing its praises.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“we saw self-identity, needs, and moral response go from physiocentric to biocentric to egocentric to ethnocentric to worldcentric, the platform for all higher and truly spiritual developments.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“dialectic of progress at every turn—hardly a sweetness-and-light affair! Holons not only have an inside and outside, they also exist as individuals and as collectives. This means that every holon has four facets, which we called the four quadrants: intentional, behavioral, cultural, and social”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“So these Nondual traditions do not necessarily abandon emotions, or thoughts, or desires, or inclinations. The task is simply to see the Emptiness of all Form, not to actually get rid of all Form. And so Forms continue to arise, and you learn to surf.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“it burns away certain lingering afflictions and sources of ignorance. Each time you fully enter this state, more of these afflictions are burned away. And after a certain number and type of these entrances—often four—you have burned away everything there is to burn, and so you can enter this state at will, and remain there permanently. You can enter nirvana permanently, and samsara ceases to arise in your case. The entire world of Form ceases to arise.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“And so the typical structure of experience is like a punch in the face. The ordinary self is the battered self—it is utterly battered by the universe “out there.” The ordinary self is a series of bruises, of scars, the results of these two hands of experience smashing together. This bruising is called “duhkha,” suffering.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“Across the board, the sense of being any sort of Seer or Witness or Self vanishes altogether. You don’t look at the sky, you are the sky. You can taste the sky. It’s not out there. As Zen would say, you can drink the Pacific Ocean in a single gulp, you can swallow the Kosmos whole—precisely because awareness is no longer split into a seeing subject in here and a seen object out there. There is just pure seeing. Consciousness and its display are not-two.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“It is beyond nature mysticism, beyond deity mysticism, and beyond formless mysticism—it is the reality or the Suchness of each, and thus integrates each in its embrace.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“various types of meditation often aim for different transpersonal realms. Some aim for psychic experiences, some for the deity mysticism of the subtle realm, some for the formlessness and Freedom of the causal Witness, and some for nondual Unity or One Taste,”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“The worldview of fulcrum-4 is still mythological, and so care and concern are extended to believers in the same mythology, the same ideology, the same race, the same creed, the same culture—but no further. If you are a member of the myth, you are my brother, my sister. If not, you go to hell.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“They dramatically overidealize this primitive lack of differentiation. Just because the self is not aware of suffering does not mean it has a positive presence of spiritual bliss. Lack of awareness doesn’t mean presence of paradise!”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“When you step off the ladder altogether, you are in free fall in Emptiness. Inside and outside, subject and object, lose all ultimate meaning. You are no longer “in here” looking at the world “out there.” You are not looking at the Kosmos, you are the Kosmos. The universe of One Taste announces itself, bright and obvious, radiant and clear, with nothing outside, nothing inside, an unending gesture of great perfection, spontaneously accomplished. The very Divine sparkles in every sight and sound, and you are simply that.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“And if they are to live up to their spiritual experiences, then they will have to grow and develop. They will have to start the developmental unfolding, the holarchical expansion, the actual inhabiting of the expanding spheres of consciousness. Their center of gravity has to shift—to transform—to these deeper or higher spheres of consciousness; it does no good to merely “idealize” them in theoretical chit-chat and talking religion”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“The ladder is much higher than the climber, who remains committed to the lower rungs. It’s one thing to tap into a higher level; quite another to actually live there! And the same thing can happen with spiritual experiences. People can temporarily access some very high rungs in the ladder or circle of awareness, but they refuse to actually live from those levels—they won’t actually climb up there. Their center of gravity remains quite low, even debased”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“Maybe the evolutionary sequence really is from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit, each transcending and including, each with a greater depth and greater consciousness and wider embrace. And in the highest reaches of evolution, maybe, just maybe, an individual’s consciousness does indeed touch infinity—a total embrace of the entire Kosmos—a Kosmic consciousness that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“There is a spectrum of depth, a spectrum of consciousness. And evolution unfolds that spectrum. Consciousness unfolds more and more, realizes itself more and more, comes into manifestation more and more. Spirit, consciousness, depth—so many words for the same thing.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“evolution meanders more than it progresses. But over the long haul, evolution has a broad telos, a broad direction, which is particularly obvious with increasing differentiation—an atom to an amoeba to an ape!”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“We have to be very careful about these types of limited and anthropomorphic characteristics, which is one of the reasons I prefer “Emptiness” as a term for Spirit, because it means unbounded or unqualifiable.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“With a sudden shock of the utterly obvious, you recognize your own Original Face, the face you had prior to the Big Bang, the face of utter Emptiness that smiles as all creation and sings as the entire Kosmos—and it is all undone in that primal glance, and all that is left is the smile, and the reflection of the moon on a quiet pond, late on a crystal clear night.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“You can take a watch apart and analyze its parts, but they won’t tell you the time of day. It’s the same with any holon. The wholeness of the holon is not found in any of its parts, and that puts an end to a certain reductionistic frenzy that has plagued Western science virtually from its inception. Particularly with the systems sciences, the vivid realization has dawned: we live in a universe of creative emergence.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything

“It seems that only when Ascending and Descending are united can both be saved. And if we—if you and I—do not contribute to this union, then it is very possible that not only will we destroy the only Earth we have, we will forfeit the only Heaven we might otherwise embrace.”
― Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything