The world of Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber is a spiritual teacher and writer based in the United States. His teachings are known as Integral Theory, and have created both interest and controversy in New Age circles over the years. Wilber has attempted a grand synthesis of several different spiritual traditions, including transpersonal psychology, Mahayana Buddhism and the cosmic evolutionism typical of much New Age thinking.

"Ken Wilber: Thought as passion" is a book by Frank Visser, introducing Wilber to a broad, popular audience. The book was originally published in Dutch. The English translation is dated 2003. "Thought as passion" has a foreword by Ken Wilber himself, thus giving it a kind of quasi-imprimatur. Indeed, the book is pro-Wilber. Later, Visser broke with Wilber and became one of his foremost critics. Strangely, Visser's website Integral World still carries an ad for "Thought as passion".

Wilber's thinking has gone through several different phases, and although he has written voluminously over the years, there is even more in the form of unpublished manuscripts. Still, it seems that Visser have captured most of Wilber's thinking up to the publication date (apparently, Wilber is now embarked on a "post-metaphysical turn", which naturally isn't described in the book).

Wilber began as a supporter of the movement known as transpersonal psychology, a more explicitly spiritual version of humanistic psychology. Later, he began to steer a more independent course. Wilber makes a fundamental distinction between the "prepersonal" and the "transpersonal". In his opinion, much of New Age spirituality is regressive, since it confuses prepersonal states with true mysticism, which is transpersonal. Examples of prepersonal spirituality include Gaia religion, neo-shamanism, Jungian archetypes, attempts to relive a paradisiacal childhood, etc. Wilber also believes that the personal is a positive development and a necessary precondition for the transpersonal. This leads him to look positively upon modernity, liberal democracy and individualism. This, too, creates conflicts with certain alternative milieux, such as ecofeminism. All these themes are extensively covered in Visser's book.

Visser have also included several biographical chapters, since these are important for Wilber's spiritual development. Indeed, Wilber's bestselling book seems to be "Grace and grit", an autobiographical account of his tragic second marriage.

A concluding chapter discusses possible influences on Wilber's Integral Theory. Since Visser was a Theosophist when writing "Thought as passion", he quite naturally sees a lot of parallels with Theosophical teachings. He also mentions Huston Smith and other Traditionalist writers. There are also intriguing similarities with E.F. Schumacher's "A guide for the perplexed" (Visser never discusses Schumacher's sources, however). A more sinister character who pops up now and then is Adi Da, who may have been a cult leader. Since Wilber turned "post-metaphysical" shortly before the publication of Visser's book, there are probably other sources of inspiration today.

"Ken Wilber: Thought as passion" is well written, and presumably well translated. It's subject-matter is probably too narrow for the general reader, but it might be of considerable interest to spiritual seekers who are into Buddhism, Hinduism or New Age. Obviously, it's also of some interest to admirers of Kenneth Earl Wilber II.

In real life, however, Ken has moved on... And so, apparently, has Frank Visser.