Ken Wilber was born on this day, January 31, 1949.
Ken Wilber is an American philosopher, writer and theorist on transpersonal psychology perhaps best known for his own Integral Theory and contributions to Spiral Dynamics.
Thinking of Ken Wilber takes me down the meandering path of my own spiritual and personal growth journey, because though I never studied his work directly, his theories have influenced many of my early teachers and my community of coaches and spiritual entrepreneurs.
Years ago, I studied and thought hard about the implications of these philosophies, many of them with complexities far beyond my ability or desire to comprehend. These learned scholars must know something, I thought, and my job was to learn it.
Through the derivative theories based on the work of Clare Graves, I was taught that each human must go through levels of consciousness in a particular order as part of their evolution.
Not much of this seems strictly true or useful to me now, but I did have a profound insight through studying this work:
The world looks different to different people.
This sounds obvious, but prior to my NLP studies, I didn’t realize just how deeply this was true. The thoughts we have that seem true — we call them “beliefs” – become the premise for who we are and how the world works.
This is true to such an extent that the world I live in may be so different from the one you see that it’s completely unrecognizable.
I have glimpses of this when someone says, “There’s so much chaos in the world. People are so angry!”
I’m taken aback. The world I live in looks nothing like this.
Of course, war, natural disasters and unrest happen in my world, but it hardly feels like “chaos” to me, and people don’t seem particularly angry. I have kind, loving interactions with people every day.
It’s as if we’re living on different planets, and in a very real sense, we are.
The reality we live in is created by our experience of thought. Thought is variable, and the one place the “levels” theories are helpful is in recognizing that though our level of consciousness goes up and down, there’s a certain range on the spectrum where we tend to hang out, and that creates the way the world looks to us.
If I lived in a world of constant chaos and anger, I’d be scared, too.
If I lived in a world where depression lurked around every corner, I’d do everything I knew to avoid it, including creating strict rules of conduct for myself and others.
Everything we do and say makes perfect sense from inside the world it seems we’re living in, and each of us is living our own version of it.
At first it helped me with others because I could see clearly that their behavior wasn’t personal; it was normal and sane for the world they lived in.
Now, it’s even more impactful for myself.
When I am possessed by thoughts of insecurity, other people look superior, their words feel hurtful, and my performance is never good enough.
But that is not the world; that’s my insecure thought projected onto the world to create my reality.
Under the influence of insecurity, I am in a very real sense insane. I react rather than respond, and hurt myself or others in a desperate attempt to stay safe.
Seeing this is freedom.
It’s like watching a scary movie, feeling terrified, and suddenly waking up to the fact that it isn’t happening – it’s only a movie.
The movie in my head is what I’m feeling, not life, and that movie is more convincing than the best virtual reality game. It looks and feels real, and my body registers sensations that seem to prove it.
Beneath the movie in my head, there is the stillness of the blank screen it plays on.
The aliveness of Divine Mind powers the whole movie of Thought projected onto the screen of Consciousness.
All the complexity of these meta-theories and the levels invented to explain life, and it all boils down to this:
The world is always beautiful; sometimes I just think it isn’t.
“Let come what comes, let go what goes. See what remains.” – Ramana Maharshi
I’m left with the feeling of myself as a space, through which thought blows like autumn leaves in the wind. They come and go, yet the happening of me, the aliveness untouched by the content of my mind, remains.
I’m grateful for the contributions of teachers like Ken Wilber, and even more grateful that I can let it all go and still have everything I need.
If you’d like to have an experience of your true self, beyond your circumstances or the stories you’ve told about them, I’d like to invite you to a conversation about Being Unstoppable.
Once you know who you really are, nothing can stop you. Let’s have a chat and see if you’re up for rediscovering and unleashing your true power. 🥰
Yours in love and play,
Steph
