Ken Wilber - Grace and Grit: A Love Story

A S I WRITE THIS , it has been thirty years since Treyas death. Yet the time we had together seems like it happened yesterday. And in a certain sense it did. Not because the events we shared are still so vivid (although they are), but because they are literally timeless.

I always found the way that we met to be hilarious, although it is something of an inside joke. I had been staying with Frances Vaughan and Roger Walsh in Francess beautiful home in Tiburon, California. It was 1983, and at that time I had been a writer for around a dozen years. I had written my first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, when I was twenty-three; it had received a large, surprisingly enthusiastic worldwide response; and I was catapultedbasically still as a kidinto something of a minor international fame. I continued writing a book or so a year, became better known with each book (at least in the small community known as transpersonal psychology), and some twelve years and ten books later here I was in Tiburon staying with Frances and Roger, who were two equally well-known pioneers in the field.

(Transpersonal psychology was known as the Forth Force of psychologythe first three forces being behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and humanistic psychology, which were the largest and most influential schools of psychology then in existence. Forth Force had been founded by the genius American psychologist Abraham Maslow, who had already founded Third Force, or humanistic psychology, precisely to provide a larger and more encompassing view of psychology than the first two rather limited approaches. But Maslow found even Third Force humanistic psychology to be too narrowit didnt provide a truly welcoming space for the genuinely higher potentials of a human being, things like peak experiences and altered states and potentials that might be called spiritual, at least in the sense of todays common phrase spiritual but not religiousand so Maslow founded Forth Force. And this was the field that I had rather quickly become known in. As it would turn out, this spiritual but not religious force would have a stunningly profound impact on Treyas and my relationship, starting from the very first moment.)

The inside joke: I had been at Frances and Rogers for about a year, and since I was single, Frances and Roger, throughout the year, had dutifully looked around for unsuspecting females. It always seemed to meas I remember it, anywaythat Roger, who was, shall we say, a male man type person, would always set me up with women who were gorgeous but not exactly interested in the academic work I did. And Francesbeing of the opposite binary typewould always set me up with women who were good for my soul. Roger would pick gorgeous body-exhilarating; Frances would find wise soul-enhancingone good for the body, one good for the soul. One day Roger came in and said, Ive got the perfect woman for you. I cant believe I didnt think of this before. Her name is Terry Killam (Treyas name at the time). Knowing what that almost certainly meant, I thought, Well, thanks, I think Ill take a skip on that. Then, three days later, Frances came in and said, Ive got the perfect woman for you. I cant believe I didnt think of this before. Her name is Terry Killam. And this part I remember perfectly. Without hesitating, I looked at Frances and said, Ill marry her. Those were the first three words out of my mouth concerning Treya. Roger and Frances agreeing? This just had to be, I figured, a gorgeous woman who was good for my soul. Those both turned out to be serious understatements.

I mentioned that a spiritual but not religious dynamic was central to our relationship. Whenever you even get into a topic like that, there are at least a hundred ways to sound utterly maudlin, sappy, and altogether pathetic. I shall try to commit only two or three of those terrors. But this dynamic was clearly operating in us from the very beginning. It wasnt so much love at first sight, although I had indeed fallen in love with Treyas physical beauty at first sight. Almost every person finds their partner to be inexplicably adorable, and I did find Treyas beauty to be breathtakingas in, seriously take-your-breath-away.

But it was our first date; we sat on the porch and put our arms around each other; and almost instantly, both of us felt a complete self-dissolution and an immersion in a vast, timeless, seemingly eternal Ground of Being (however you might wish to conceive that). It was love at first touch, and we both knew it, and frankly, we were both rather totally dumbfounded by it. For the next several hours, all I could do was keep asking, completely bewildered, Has anything like this ever happened to you? And she kept saying, Not like this. Myself, I had been in love at first sight on several occasions; I had never been in love at first touch. Everything dissolved; the self-sense was gone; there was only profound, limitless, radiant, all-pervading, timeless and eternal Thusness.