Ken Wilber

In the heart of Emptiness there is a mysterious impulse, mysterious because there is actually nothing in the heart of Emptiness (for there is nothing in Emptiness, period). Yet, there it is, this mysterious impulse, the impulse to … create. To sing, to shine, to radiate; to send forth, reach out, and celebrate; to sing and shout and walk about; to effervesce and bubble over, this mysterious exuberance in the heart of Emptiness.

Evolution goes beyond what went before, but because it must embrace what went before, then its very nature is to transcend and include and thus it has an inherent directionality, a secret impulse, toward increasing depth, increasing intrinsic value, increasing consciousness. In order for evolution to move at all, it must move in those directions—there’s no place else for it to go!

We must preserve the dignity of modernity even while we attempt to overcome the disaster of modernity.

Each stage of development, remember, has a dialectic of progress--in plain language, every new development is good news, bad news.

Arthur Koestler coined the term 'holon' to refer to an entity that is itself a whole and simultaneously a part of some other whole… for instance, a whole atom is a part of a whole molecule, and the whole molecule is part of a whole cell, and the whole cell is part of a whole organism, and so on. Each of these entities is neither a whole nor a part, but a whole/part, a holon.

So spirit is both the highest “level” in the holarchy, but it’s also the paper on which the entire holarchy is written. It’s the highest rung in the ladder, but it’s also the wood out of which the entire ladder is made.

Evolution goes beyond what went before, but because it must embrace what went before, then its very nature is to transcend and include and thus it has an inherent directionality, a secret impulse, toward increasing depth, increasing intrinsic value, increasing consciousness. In order for evolution to move at all, it must move in those directions—there’s no place else for it to go!

A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe’; a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison.

Thus, ultimately to try to escape a distress merely perpetuates that distress. What is so upsetting is not the distress itself, but our attachment to that distress. We identify with it, and that alone is the real difficulty.

'States' still must be converted to 'traits.' You still have to go from acorn to oak if you are going to become one with the forest. So while 'states' are important, 'stages' are even more important.

‘Integrative’ simply means that this approach attempts to include as many important truths from as many disciplines as possible—from the East as well as the West, from premodern and modern and postmodern, from the hard sciences of physics to the tender sciences of spirituality. As one critic put it, this integrative approach ‘honors and incorporates more truth than any approach in history.’ I would obviously like to believe that is true, but you can best be the judge of that as you read the following pages.