Ken Wilber Quotes

During my solitude, conflicting thoughts increased; but much exercise of soul had the effect of causing the scriptures to gain complete ascendancy over me. I had always owned them to be the Word of GOD . . . the careful reading of the Acts afforded me a practical picture of the early church; which made me feel deeply the contrast with its actual present state; though still, as ever beloved by GOD.

Like all other lonely or hungry things, ego loves the light. It sees light, and the possibility of being close to the soul, and it creeps up to it and steals one of its essential camouflages. In a hunger for soul, our own ego-self steals the pelt

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.

Nervous breakdowns can be highly underrated methods of spiritual transformation.

My soul is not a palace of the past.

[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that.

You are either losing your mind -- or gaining your soul.

If you're losing your soul and you know it, then you've still got a soul left to lose.

I went to America to convert the Indians, but, oh, who shall convert me? Who, what, is he that will deliver me from this evil heart of unbelief?

Religious life is an encounter with the living God. Sometimes that encounter is preceded by a kind of soul-searching agony that tries desperately not to hear, runs in the opposite direction, and frantically tries to reason itself out of answering the invitation.

Catastrophe is the essence of the spiritual path, a series of breakdowns allowing us to discover the threads that weave all of life into a whole cloth.

I was hurrying through my own soul . . . I was leaning out . . . I was listening.

Modern culture is in so much trouble, where people don't have a deep inner life, or any deep experience of their true self in God, who they were before anyone said anything about them, before they received their first medal or ego identification. That's why suffering is so important, because suffering is when those little rewards are taken away from you.

I felt like I was literally losing myself as being the joyful, spiritual, passionate, exciting woman that I naturally had been.

To heal the wound, you have to go into the dark night of the soul.

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

That which oppresses me, is it my soul trying to come out in the open, or the soul of the world knocking at my heart for entrance?

And it is in this darkness, when there is nothing left in us that can please or comfort our own minds, when we seem to be useless and worthy of all contempt, when we seem to have failed, when we seem to be destroyed and devoured, it is then that the deep and secret selfishness that is too close to us for us to identify is stripped away from our souls. It is in this darkness that we find liberty. It is in this abandonment that we are made strong. This is the night which empties us and makes us pure.

We are searching for the core of our lives; our culture intuits that writing, that ancient activity, might be the pathway...Awakening does not feed ego's needs and desires; it pulverizes the self. Our society couldn't knowingly bear such reduction, so we've tricked ourselves into the same path but call it writing.

The spiritual journey does not consist of arriving at a new destination where a person gains what he did not have, or becomes what he is not. It consists in the dissipation of one's own ignorance concerning oneself and life, and the gradual growth of that understanding which begins the spiritual awakening. The finding of God is a coming to one?s self.

You do not have to struggle to reach God, but you do have to struggle to tear away the self-created veil that hides him from you

The real you is on the side of God against the false self

We've gotten lost in our Ego and have forgotten that our Soul's only motive is to merge with the Beloved.

Solitude is the furnace of transformation. Without solitude we remain victims of our society and continue to be entangled in the illusions of the false self.