"To the Best of Our Knowledge" Interviews Ken Wilber

Steve Paulson

As an interviewer on To the Best of Our Knowledge, Paulson has specialized in covering environmental issues and popular culture. He’s especially fascinated by the stories of field biologists. “I find these people both inspiring and admirable,” he says, “because they manage to combine science with difficult conservation work.”

Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber is the most widely translated academic writer in America, with 25 books translated into some 30 foreign languages, and is the first philosopher-psychologist to have his Collected Works published while still alive. Wilber is an internationally acknowledged leader and the preeminent scholar of the Integral stage of human development, which continues to gather momentum around the world. His many books, all of which are still in print, can be found at Amazon.com. Some of his more popular books include Integral Spirituality; No Boundary; Grace and Grit; Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; and the "everything" books: A Brief History of Everything (one of his largest selling books) and A Theory of Everything (probably the shortest introduction to his work).  Ken Wilber is the founder of Integral Institute, Inc., the co-founder of Integral Life, Inc., and the Senior Fellow of Integral Life Spiritual Center.

 

Steve Paulson is the Executive Producer of, and an interviewer on, "To the Best of Our Knowledge," a Peabody Award-winning radio show produced by Wisconsin Public Radio, and distributed nationally.  As part of a 5-hour series on science and religion that will be airing this fall, Ken agreed to speak with Steve.  This is the first time in over 20 years that Ken has agreed to appear on National Public Radio, and it is an exciting event indeed.

Like the first part of this rapid-fire dialogue, this continues to be one of the best short introductions we’ve seen to the Integral Approach.  In this second half of their conversation, Steve and Ken touch on everything from the future of artificial intelligence, to the direct experience of spiritual awakening, to the mystical view on quantum physics.

Topics include:

• The relationship between interior consciousness and exterior form, and how increasing complexity of consciousness co-arises with increasing complexity of form (known also as the "law of consciousness and complexity").
  
• The metaphysical approaches of the great wisdom traditions, and how, from an integral or post-metaphysical view, spiritual realities aren’t meta-, or beyond, the physical, but intra-physical; they are not beyond matter, but interior to it.
  
• The role of awakening or satori in artificial intelligence, and the startling ramifications of what it could mean if a computer became enlightened.
  
• Ken’s personal experience of spiritual states such as nondual suchness, and how these kinds of states of consciousness are distinct from stages or structures of consciousness, which is one of the more exciting contributions of a truly Integral Spirituality.*
  
• The importance of multiple intelligences in explaining how people considered by many to be spiritual masters can sometimes also be rotten individuals (just because one is highly developed in one intelligence or line doesn’t mean one is necessarily as highly developed in other lines—this general distinction is known as levels and lines).
  
• Why the popular attempt to have quantum physics explain or prove mysticism is doomed to fail, and ends up violating the essential tenets of both disciplines.  Ken goes on to explain why many of the founders of quantum physics were in fact deep mystics, not because of the explanatory power of physics, but because of the questions physics had no answers for.
  

If you’re new to the Integral Approach and AQAL Theory, this dialogue is a fantastic introduction.  If you’re an AQAL veteran, this dialogue is an incredible lesson in how one can express the integral vision without relying on jargon.

Wherever you happen to find yourself, we invite you to join us on this energetic and clarifying tour of some of the most fascinating questions of our time....