Ken Wilber

Kenneth Earl Wilber Jr. (born January 31, 1949, Oklahoma City, USA) is an American philosopher and mystic. His work focuses mainly on creating an "integral theory of consciousness" in which the insights of mysticism, postmodernism, science and systems theory come together to form a coherent picture of the Kosmos. In Kosmic Consciousness, Wilber states that he considers himself a storyteller and a mapmaker; his stories address universal questions and his maps integrate various perspectives of the cosmos.

Biography

Education

Ken Wilber was born on January 31, 1949 in Oklahoma City, OK. His father was in the Air Force and Oklahoma was just a temporary sojourn in a journey through Bermuda, El Paso, TX, Idaho, and Great Falls, MT where he began high school. For his senior year they moved to Lincoln, NE where he was valedictorian of his high school class. He remembers the frequent moves as traumatic, though he was successful in athletics and was several times elected student body or class president. "People think I am anti-social, but that is quite wrong. When at twenty-three I engaged my adult interests of writing and meditation, it was hard for me to stop being with people and spend my life in a corner." (p. 19, Visser)

Related Topics:
January 31 - 1949 - Bermuda - El Paso, TX - Idaho - Great Falls, MT - Lincoln, NE - Valedictorian - Meditation

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In 1968 he enrolled as a pre-med student at Duke University, but almost immediately experienced a crisis of disillusionment with what science had to offer. It was not the psychedelics then in vogue which inspired him. It was Eastern literature, particularly the Tao Te Ching, which catalyzed his conversion. Academically he lost that first year, but returned to Nebraska, enrolled in the University, and completed a bachelor's degree with double majors in chemistry and biology. This he managed to do while spending much of his time pursuing Eastern philosophy and Western psychology. He won a scholarship to do graduate study in biochemistry, but by this time he was thoroughly ensnared by the philosophical and contemplative life, and dropped out. He describes his academic accomplishments as "a Master's degree in biochemistry, and a Ph.D. minus thesis in biochemistry and biophysics, with specialization in the mechanism of the visual process."

Related Topics:
Duke University - Psychedelics - Tao Te Ching - University - Biochemistry - Biophysics

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While tutoring he met Amy Wagner in 1972. They decided to live together and married a year later. The relationship was committed to shared responsibilities, and Wilber did odd jobs such as dishwashing for the next nine years to contribute his share to their support. The menial work provided balance while he continued to write. He never relished writing, but thought of himself more as a thinker. To hone his writing skills he copied all the books of Alan Watts verbatim, in longhand. His method for the next ten years was to study for ten months or so, conceive a book in its entirety, then to write obsessively to complete it in two or three months.

Related Topics:
Alan Watts - Obsessive

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Early career

In 1973 he completed the manuscript for his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, the first fruit of his quest to integrate thought from disparate fields. After rejections by more than twenty publishers it was finally accepted by Quest Books, a theosophical organization in 1977. It was well received, with Wilber being compared to such luminaries as William James, Freud, and even Einstein. The success brought opportunities for many lectures and workshops, which he gave up after a year to provide more time for his writing. He also helped to launch the journal ReVision in 1978. No Boundary was a popularized summary of The Spectrum of Consciousness published in 1979. It was followed by the sociological works The Atman Project (1980) and Up from Eden (1981). The editorial demands of the journal on his time increased, and in 1981 he agreed to an amicable divorce from Amy and moved to Cambridge, MA to work on ReVision projects.

Related Topics:
Theosophical - William James - Freud - Einstein - Cambridge, MA

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In 1983 he moved to Marin County, CA, where he met and soon married Terry (Treya) Killam. At the same time she was diagnosed with breast cancer. From the fall of 1984 until 1987 Wilber gave up most of his writing to focus on caring for her. During this stressful time their relationship was tested when he temporarily ceased meditation and turned to alcohol. During their brief stay in a home they had built at Incline Village (Lake Tahoe, NV), Wilber contracted a chronic illness in 1985 which he still struggles with today. In 1987 they moved to Boulder, CO to be near the Naropa Institute, a Buddhist University founded by Chogyam Trungpa. Here they found the peace they had been seeking, even though Treya died in January, 1989. Their joint experience was recorded in the book Grace and Grit (1991).

Related Topics:
Marin County, CA - Lake Tahoe - Boulder, CO - Naropa Institute - Buddhist - Chogyam Trungpa

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Recent works

He worked for a time on a textbook of integral psychology (eventually published in 1999 as part of volume IV of his Collected Works), but left it to focus on the three year project Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (SES), (1995), the massive first volume of a proposed Kosmos Trilogy. During that period of isolation he experienced an extended, eleven day mystical enlightenment. A Brief History of Everything (1996) was the non-footnoted, popularized summary of SES in the form of an imagined, extended interview. The Eye of Spirit (1997) was a compilation of articles he had written for ReVision on the relationship between science and religion. A shorter revised edition was published by Random House in 1998 as The Marriage of Sense and Soul. In 1997 he met Marci Walters, a young student at the Naropa Institute. They lived together for five years, getting married in June 2001, but then separating in 2002. Wilber considers that time as the most productive thus far of his career, but had felt from the beginning of their relationship that Marci would eventually move on to raise a family.

Related Topics:
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality - Random House

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Throughout 1997 he had kept journals of his personal experiences, which were published in 1999 as One Taste, his term for cosmic, or unitary consciousness. Over the next two years his publisher Shambhala Publications, took the unusual step of releasing eight re-edited volumes of his Collected Works. The year 1999 was particularly productive as he finished his Integral Psychology and wrote A Theory of Everything (2000) which attempts to bridge business, politics, science and spirituality in a short introduction to his thought that also integrates Spiral Dynamics. In 1999 he also wrote the first draft of Boomeritis (2002), a novel that attempts to expose the egotism of his generation.

Related Topics:
Shambhala - Integral Psychology - Spiral Dynamics - Boomeritis

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Since 1987, Wilber has lived in Boulder, CO, where he is working on his Kosmos trilogy and supervising the work of the Integral Institute.

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