Ken Wilber is one of our Living Spiritual Teachers, a transpersonal psychologist and philosopher, founder of the Integral Institute, and author of a couple dozen books translated into dozens of languages around the world. He’s one of the most recognized scholars of human development over the last half century.
As much as any living writer, Wilber excels at weaving human living through the paths of big ideas. This new book — published in Wilber’s seventy-sixth year — offers a kind of “theory of everything” that includes bridging Eastern spirituality with Western science, which is what Wilber long-ago coined as “integral theory.”
By the midpoint of Finding Radical Wholeness Wilber pauses to remind readers: “We are in search of a Big Wholeness … a truly holistic Big Wholeness.”
At nearly 500 pages, you need to commit to this book to get from it all that Wilber offers. However, although there are 19 chapters, if you only read the first four you will still gain much. These chapters move through what Wilber calls waking up, growing up, opening up, cleaning up, and the value of spiritual intelligence versus spiritual experience. Start there.
Then, the nuance grows, and there are further layers and opportunities. Chapters 5-9 go into more detail about “growing up,” offering more stages of the processes, including how growing up works with mystical experiences. In this part of the book, Wilber addresses as only he can topics such as atheism, green religion, tantra, and the excesses of rationality.
By this point, there is still another half left. We will only point to the two chapters we found most essential for a wide segment of S&P readers: Wilber’s teaching regarding shadow therapy, as well as a short late chapter on “The Feelings of Enlightenment.”
Describing shadow therapy, Wilber writes that “one of the most historically profound and significant discoveries about human nature that has been made” in the last several hundred years is “the psychodynamic unconscious, the nature of repression, the nature of the shadow, and the various therapies to address, and even heal, those dysfunctions.” These paths of healing are the core of what Wilber offers as “cleaning up” for radical wholeness and spiritual maturity.
Lastly, the ten pages of chapter 17, “The Feelings of Enlightenment,” could be read a dozen times (we read them four): first, for information; next, for inspiration; again, for detailed instructions about process; and yet again from a whetted appetite desire to enter into what Wilber so beautifully describes. Who doesn’t want to know the “Bliss and Love” that Wilber explains is the essence of enlightenment and experiencing nondualism, “which is the feeling tone of ultimate Freedom-and-Fullnesss … the very lining of every perception, impulse, sensation, and experience that you will ever have”?
We read Wilber for his insights into spiritual practice and the natural ways that he places a mystical approach to life in the center of daily activities, and Finding Radical Wholeness does not disappoint.
