The Integral Path: Finding Radical Wholeness by Ken Wilber (Book Summary)

About the Book Finding Radical Wholeness

“This is a book about Wholeness. I’m capitalizing ‘Wholeness’ because I want to give it a certain weight. In fact, I claim—and will try to convince you—that discovering a genuine Wholeness is actually the meaning of a real spirituality, and thus it can offer you a genuine meaning and purpose to your life.”

• “In this book, you will find ways to fully discover a real Wholeness in the midst of your life and see the profound difference that it can make for your own being and awareness.”
• “What we will be directly exploring in this book is a knowledge by acquaintance—a direct experience—of Wholeness, and although this ultimate Unity consciousness will be described (an explanation), you will need to directly experience this Wholeness yourself to actually know what it means.”
• “If there were one point alone that I would like you to take from this book, it would be ‘You have to know where to look for Wholeness.’ The vast majority of people in this world have very little Wholeness in their lives because nobody ever showed them where to look for it.”
• “5 different types of Wholeness: Waking Up, Growing Up, Opening Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up … If you put all of these types of Wholeness together, you will have what could be called a wildly inclusive ‘Big Wholeness’ … There is, today, no system of growth anywhere in the world that includes all 5 of these types of Wholeness … Genuine Wholeness—Big Wholeness—makes room for everything in your life, much of which right now might not be included.”
• “Growing Up (a Wholeness that becomes obvious when you include all the important levels in your life), Opening Up (including all the important lines), Cleaning Up (including all the shadow elements), Waking Up (including all the important states), and Showing Up (including all the quadrants).”

Waking Up

“Waking Up is a baseline position for those who want a deep, extensive, and even absolute experience of Wholeness, and it has probably had a more profound impact on human history than any other experience that has ever occurred … The Wholeness that Waking Up provides is about the largest Wholeness you can think of—it’s almost as big as ‘big’ can get—short of a truly Big Wholeness.”

• “Waking Up systems maintain two things about the ultimate goal of Awakening: (1) everybody fully possesses right now the already Enlightened or fully Awakened Mind (of pure Wholeness), but (2) virtually nobody is aware of it.”
• “These ‘spiritual but not religious’ experiences can ground a type of interior science, which takes nothing on belief or as dogma but rather bases its claims on direct experience and evidence, and asks you to believe nothing that you haven’t verified for yourself.”
• “Generally speaking, the path of Waking Up had a single major goal. It started with the average state of consciousness of a typical human being, which was said to be narrow, limited, fragmented, and marked by inherent suffering, anxiety, and torment—a state that generally was said to involve what is called the ‘separate-self sense,’ ‘self-contraction,’ the ‘illusory self,’ the ‘fallen self,’ the ‘dreaming self,’ or simply the ‘ego’ (none of them complimentary terms). The goal of Waking Up was, through the direct experimental practices of meditation, contemplation, or yoga, to transform consciousness from that limited and contracted state through several much more inclusive, open, and free states, to a genuine Wholeness, a pure Nonduality, an ultimate Unity consciousness or Kosmic consciousness, an absolute Oneness with the entire universe.”
• “Waking Up, the claim went, deals not with relative truth but with ultimate Truth. Ultimate Truth does not deal with a particular being or group of beings; it deals with Being itself, with a capital B—the Ground of All Being, spaceless and therefore infinite, timeless and therefore eternal, and a groundless Ground that underlies every relative truth in existence but is not itself a relative truth (and thus is not detectable by ordinary, external science but only by an interior, meditative science).”
• “In Waking Up, the claim (metaphorically) is that we are directly realizing a Oneness with ultimate Reality itself—a direct experience of being one with the Divine, one with Spirit, one with our own highest and deepest Ground of Being, one with the Great Perfection. Waking Up directly increases the territory of your self by moving you through various dimensions of increasing wholeness until you reach a radical Oneness with the entire universe.”

Waking Up state-stages:

“The major states of consciousness become the major stages of meditation, because a person’s central identity starts out confined to the typical ego-dominated waking state, and with increasing meditation, it ends up traversing all of the state-stages in consciousness, resulting in a pure Awakening of ultimate Unity consciousness. I refer to this sequence of state-stages, in whole or part, as Waking Up.”