Ken Wilber - Integral Meditation: Mindfulness as a Way to Grow Up, Wake Up, and Show Up in Your Life

ABOUT THE BOOK

Prepare to encounter your mind in a radically new way as Ken Wilber introduces Integral Mindfulness, a meditative approach based on Integral Theory and Practice. This leading-edge technique combines, for the first time in history, the ancient paths of meditation and mindfulnessor Waking Upwith modern research into psychological development and human evolutionGrowing Upresulting in a complete and powerfully effective method of personal transformation. Integral Meditation focuses attention on the inner maps we use to navigate lifein relationships, at work and study, in play, in just about everything we do. Mindfulness is used to unearth these unconscious maps, then uproot them so that we can substitute happier and healthier perspectives. With experiential exercises, guided meditation instructions, and tools to identify the individuals own greatest potential, this book points the way to realizing our Supreme Identityand to finding the reason why each of us has come into being: to embody and express in the world our unique perspective of Spirit.

KEN WILBER is the author of over twenty books. He is the founder of Integral Institute, a think tank for studying Integral Theory and Practice, with outreach through local and online communities such as Integral Education Network, Integral Training, and Integral Spiritual Center.

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Integral

Meditation

Mindfulness as a Way to Grow Up, Wake Up, and Show Up in Your Life

Ken Wilber

Shambhala + Boulder + 2016

Shambhala Publications, Inc.

4720 Walnut Street

Boulder, Colorado 80301

www.shambhala.com

2016 by Ken Wilber

Cover art by Masterfile/royalty-free

Cover design by Jim Zaccaria

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Wilber, Ken.

Integral meditation: mindfulness as a way to grow up, wake up, and show up in your life / Ken Wilber.First Edition.

pages cm

eISBN 978-0-8348-0286-5

ISBN 978-1-61180-298-6 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Meditation. 2. Mindfulness (Psychology) 3. Attention. 4. Awareness. I. Title.

BL627.W55 2015

204.35dc23

2015005715

Contents

Hello, my friends, and welcome to a presentation of Integral Meditation, with a particular emphasis on mindfulness from the perspective of Integral Theory. I trust you are going to find this practice not only truly inspiring, but radically innovative as well, because it combines one of the oldest and perhaps most effective types of meditation ever conceived with one the most leading-edge, evolutionarily advanced views of the universe yet developed. The result is an explosively powerful approach to growth, development, transformation, or personal evolution, unlike any other yet devised. I know that might sound like a lot of hype, but as you join in and try the first few experiential exercises, Im confident that youll start to view things in a remarkably new and different wayand start to feel and experience your life in a new way as well.

So lets jump right in by answering some of the questions I am most often asked about the Integral approach to mindfulness meditation, and see if you cant quickly start to make some sense of it.

When you call Integral Meditation an approach to growth and development, what exactly do you mean by growth and development?

Ongoing research has demonstrated that human beings have at least two very different types of growth and developmentand this means two very different types of spiritual engagements as well. And the funny thing is that, because one of these approaches has only recently been discovered, there has never been a path of growth or development (conventional or spiritual or any other form) that actually has included both of these incredibly important forms of growth. As well see, we refer to these two major approaches as Growing Up and Waking Up. And, as well also see, because in all of human history, no approach anyplace in the world has ever combined both of them, humanity has been producing what amounts to incomplete, broken humans for its entire history. We have literally been focusing on either just one or just the other type of growth, leaving the neglected one to basically rot.

And that means we have been producing individuals who might be quite Grown Up (or highly developed in any of their multiple intelligences), but they are not Awakened or not Enlightened (have not had a realization of what some traditions call the Supreme Identity, where individuals experience themselves as being literally one with all of reality, one with the entire universe, one with all beings. If this kind of thing sounds a little too far out for you, please stay with me for just a little bit and see if you cant start to make at least some sense of itand if so, isnt this a realization that you would like to have? In fact, one of the things well be doing in this book is finding out how you can begin to understand what this experience could mean for you personally.

Or, on the other hand, humanity did produce Awakened or Enlightened individualspeople who had followed a path of Waking Upbut they could still be relatively immature in many of their human capacities: they might be poorly developed psychosexually (and thus sexually take advantage of their students), or they might not be well developed morally despite their spiritual interests (many Nazis, for example, were well versed in yoga and meditation practices). Or they might be homophobic, sexist, racist, xenophobic, authoritarian, rigidly hierarchical, and so onthey may have been one with the world, but their capacities in that world remained relatively immature or even dysfunctional and pathological.

But never have we had a serious growth practice that worked on both Waking Up (to our Supreme Identity) and also Growing Up (or fully mature, in human terms, in all of our human capacities and multiple intelligences). A practice, in other words, that produced human beings who were truly whole, complete, and genuinely mature across the boardnot partial or fragmented. Broken human beings are literally all that we produced.

Now, you might already be practicing a spiritual path that you think is truly full and complete, and doesnt need anything extra at all added to it. I can truly understand that viewpoint. But remember that this second paththe path of Growing Upis indeed a very recent discovery in human history. It appears likely that humans have been having Waking Up experiences going back at least 50,000 years or more to the earliest shamans and medicine folk, and its very likely that if you are already practicing a spiritual path, it is from one that developed perhaps a thousand years ago, or more.

But the path of Growing Up wasnt even discovered until around 100 years agowell see why in just a moment; the point is, it is not something that is terribly obvious and easy to see, and so it is very likely that, no matter how much you introspect or meditate or look within, you will not see any of the stages of Growing Up. They just arent available by simply looking within, and that is why, as well see, you can look at every single major meditation system the world wide, and although many of them have stages of meditative development (which we will fully examine), not one of them anywhere has anything resembling the stages of Growing Up. Waking Up, yes; Growing Up, no. There is no complete path anywhere that includes both Growing Up and Waking Up.