30 Facts About Ken Wilber

Kenneth Earl Wilber II was born on January 31,1949 and is an American philosopher and writer on transpersonal psychology and his own integral theory, a philosophy which suggests a framing or categorization of all human knowledge and experience.

Ken Wilber became interested in Eastern literature, particularly the Tao Te Ching.

Ken Wilber left Duke and enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln studying biochemistry, but after a few years dropped out of university and began studying his own curriculum and writing.

In 1973 Wilber completed his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, in which he sought to integrate knowledge from disparate fields.

Ken Wilber helped to launch the journal ReVision in 1978.

In 1983, Ken Wilber married Terry "Treya" Killam who was shortly thereafter diagnosed with breast cancer.

From 1984 until 1987, Ken Wilber gave up most of his writing to care for her.

In 1987, Ken Wilber moved to Boulder, Colorado, where he worked on his Kosmos trilogy and supervised the work and functioning of the Integral Institute.

In 2012, Ken Wilber joined the advisory board of the International Simultaneous Policy Organization which seeks to end the usual deadlock in tackling global issues through an international simultaneous policy.

In order for an account of the Kosmos to be complete, Ken Wilber believes that it must include each of these five categories.

Ken Wilber rejects most of the tenets of Perennialism and the associated anti-evolutionary view of history as a regression from past ages or yugas.

Ken Wilber believes that the mystical traditions of the world provide access to, and knowledge of, a transcendental reality which is perennial, being the same throughout all times and cultures.

Ken Wilber alleges that Freud thus commits a fallacy of reduction.

Ken Wilber thinks that Jung commits the converse form of the same mistake by considering pre-rational myths to reflect divine realizations.

Ken Wilber describes the current state of the "hard" sciences as limited to "narrow science", which only allows evidence from the lowest realm of consciousness, the sensorimotor.

Ken Wilber sees science in the broad sense as characterized by involving three steps:.

Ken Wilber has presented these as "three strands of valid knowledge" in Part III of his book The Marriage of Sense and Soul.

Ken Wilber has referred to Stuart Kauffman, Ilya Prigogine, Alfred North Whitehead, and others to articulate his vitalistic and teleological understanding of reality, which is deeply at odds with the modern evolutionary synthesis.

In 2005, at the launch of the Integral Spiritual Center, a branch of the Integral Institute, Ken Wilber presented a 118-page rough draft summary of his two forthcoming books.

The Ken Wilber-Combs Lattice is a conceptual model of consciousness developed by Ken Wilber and Allan Combs.

Ken Wilber attracted a lot of controversy from 2011 to the present day by supporting Marc Gafni.

Ken Wilber has in fact publicly supported Gafni on his blog.

Ken Wilber is on the advisory board of Mariana Bozesan's AQAL Capital GmbH, a Munich-based company specialising in integral Impact Investing using a model based on Ken Wilber's Integral Theory.

Ken Wilber's philosophy has been influenced by Madhyamaka Buddhism, particularly as articulated in the philosophy of Nagarjuna.

Ken Wilber has practiced various forms of Buddhist meditation, studying with a number of teachers, including Dainin Katagiri, Taizan Maezumi, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Kalu Rinpoche, Alan Watts, Penor Rinpoche and Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche.

Ken Wilber has on several occasions singled out Adi Da's work for the highest praise while expressing reservations about Adi Da as a teacher.

Visser writes that the esoteric aspects of Ken Wilber's theory are based on the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo as well as other theorists including Adi Da.

Ken Wilber has been categorized as New Age due to his emphasis on a transpersonal view and, more recently, as a philosopher.

Ken Wilber is credited with broadening the appeal of a "perennial philosophy" to a much wider audience.

However, Ken Wilber's approach has been criticized as excessively categorizing and objectifying, masculinist, commercializing spirituality, and denigrating of emotion.