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An Interview with Myriades 1
The Origins of the Integral Vision
Contributor: 
1 of 4 in An Interview with Myriades 1 >>
In this introduction to the Integral Vision, Ken is asked, "How would you define what you do?" As the leader in the field of Integral studies and application, Ken goes all the way back to the beginning: a medical student at Duke University who couldn't get any of the important questions answered from a traditional educational setting. What's the meaning of life? Why am I here? What's the good life? What is the Good, the True, the Beautiful? Fundamentally, what is important in human life? And so he set out on his own. Are these questions that you are asking yourself too?
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.
In Part 1 of this dialogue, Ken talks with Gaspar Segafredo, Editor-in-Chief of Myriades 1, an Argentinean cultural magazine with an integral approach, about the history of the Integral Vision.
“My books simply reflect the territory that integral people are already at, and I think that’s why there’s been a fair amount of interest in my work, because it’s just providing a clarifying map of where people are already living….”
Having written The Spectrum of Consciousness when he was 23, Ken began the life-long pursuit of trying to understand the meaning and importance of being human at a remarkably early age, having since expanding his work into over two-dozen books, each building on the insights of the one before. Life, and human life in particular, is a developmental affair. It's not that there are (as Gaspar and Ken discuss) 6-7 major psychological and spiritual approaches to the same fundamental human condition, there are 6-7 developmental levels of consciousness. From archaic, to magic, to mythic, to rational, to pluralistic, to integral and beyond, there is no one answer to the meaning of life. The meaning of life literally develops along with the structures of human consciousness, in complimentary and simultaneous growth through states of consciousness, where "wakefulness" progresses from waking-gross, to dreaming-subtle, to deep-dreamless-sleep, to ever-present nondual. There are two "axes of enlightenment," one in structures of consciousness and one in states of consciousness.
Gaspar and Ken end by talking about the fact that Ken isn't imposing an Integral framework on anyone—he's giving people who are already at an integral level of development a map and a way to talk about what they are already experiencing, but don't have a language to talk about their deepest insights and intuitions into life. All we do is help provide the most complete map and language for the Integral developmental wave at the leading edge of evolution, and we'd love to have you listen in and help unfold and express this blooming edge of consciousness....
