By Bill Harris: Centerpointe Research Institute excerpt of transcript of Ken Wilber on Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now
This is Bill Harris Director of Centerpointe Research Institute and I am here today with Ken Wilber, the founder of Integral Institute and I’ll let Ken tell you a little bit more about himself.
As you know, our purpose here is to help people understand at a much deeper level what Eckhart Tolle and Oprah have been sharing and some of the related ideas and practices that might come out of this.
So Ken, great to have you here.
Ken Wilber: Well, thank you Bill. Good to be here, buddy.
Bill Harris: Yeah, so, you want to tell people, you know, since I suspect that a lot of the people that are listening may not be that familiar with who you are and what you do. You want to give a little, brief summary of that?
Ken Wilber: Sure. For close to the last 30 years or so, I have made a study of the world’s various growth technologies and the world’s various spiritual technologies, the world’s various meditative paths as well as Western forms of growth and development.
And so essentially what I did was take all of these different types of growth, types of awakening practices, types of psychotherapy, types of meditation and put them all on a table and tried to create, in a sense, a sort of a super map that included the essentials of all of them so that instead of, if you go to Zen, for example, which has some very powerful, very positive items about it, you don’t find anything about working with the unconscious or working with the shadow.
So we include the shadow plus Zen and not just one or the other and the same way with psychoanalysis. You’ll end up working with shadow material, personal, unconscious material, but very little work at all on transcendental or transpersonal or meditative awakening, deep spiritual concerns.
And so the general idea is that at the end of this, I’ve published some 25 books that have been translated into 34 languages, that the end of all of this, basically to come up with, what we call, just an integral framework or an integral map and this integral map has room for all of the various approaches around the world and it can, in fact, explain all of them.
The map itself has been used to explain over 50 human disciplines and created integral medicine, integral art, integral politics, integral educations, integral psychotherapy, integral spirituality and so on, and that map is also the foundation of a type of integral, spiritual practice.
So what we are doing when we look at what Eckhart is doing is recognize the positive stuff he has done.
There is room for it on this map. There is a place for it on this sort of super, holistic, cross-cultural map and we really applaud that and just delighted that Oprah is, you know, giving the time and attention to this aspect of awareness.
This aspect of awareness that is transcendental, that is timeless, that is focused on the pure present, the pure now moment, that all of the mystics maintain is the doorway to liberation and so it is fantastic that that’s being done and you and I want to talk about that I think.
But we also want to talk about maybe some of the extra things that can be done to make this even more effective, to touch on some of the other aspects of the human being and the human potential that Eckhart doesn’t touch on and that would make his techniques for being in the now even more effective.
So, it’s kind of, you know, a really well wishing and acknowledgment for what Eckhart and Oprah are doing and then also a little bit of supplementation on things that people can do in addition to what Eckhart is recommending and we have some places where they can go for that extra help and we’ll make that available as well.
Not including, of course, Holosync and Integral Institute itself.
Bill Harris: Yeah, you know, I think one of the things that the people in the general public who are learning about this through Oprah and Eckhart Tolle may not know, is that there is a quite extensive, I guess you could call it, subculture of people who have been involved in what he’s talking about for a long, long time and that there are many different schools of thought about it, many practices and a lot of people who are walking around in that same, that same state that Tolle is talking about.
And that one of the things that Integral Institute has done is bring a lot of … More