Book Recommendations
This is an always expanding list of books recommended by Integral Life team and community members. All of the books below are available in physical and digital formats, and many are also available as audiobooks.
Integral Life Press:
When the Buddha Needs Therapy
Awakening is not what you thought. These pages explore the idea that it is possible to be liberated from the suffering of this world, but that the path is a paradoxical one of embracing your ego even as you let it go. If you seek true liberation and freedom from the seemingly endless strife of life, you're in the right place.
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Loving Completely
From Integral Life Press, Loving Completely presents acclaimed relationship therapist Dr. Keith Witt’s five key questions that guide you to understand why we know so much about intimacy, yet still struggle so hard to be consistently fulfilled.
Purchase on AmazonThe Greatest Love Story You'll Ever Read:
Grace and Grit: Spirituality and Healing in the Life and Death of Treya Killam Wilber
The book that inspired a new major motion picture with Mena Suvari and Stuart Townsend, Grace and Grit is the compelling story of the five-year journey of Ken Wilber and his wife Treya Killam Wilber through Treya's illness, treatment, and, finally, death. A deeply moving account of a couple's struggle with cancer and their journey to spiritual healing.
Available in hardcover, paperback, digital, and audiobook formats.
New To Integral? Start With These:
A Brief History of Everything
Join one of the greatest contemporary philosophers on a breathtaking tour of time and the Cosmos.—from the Big Bang right up to the eve of the twenty-first century. This accessible and entertaining summary of Ken Wilber’s great ideas has been expanding minds now for two decades, providing a unified field theory of the universe. Along the way, Wilber talks on a host of issues related to that universe, from gender roles, to multiculturalism, environmentalism, and even the meaning of the Internet.
Available in hardcover, paperback, digital, and audiobook formats.
One Taste: Daily Reflections on Integral Spirituality
As one who has written extensively about the interior life, meditation, and psychotherapy, Ken Wilber—the leading theorist in the field of integral psychology—naturally arouses the curiosity of his numerous readers. In response to this curiosity, this one-year diary not only offers an unprecedented entrée into his private world, but offers an introduction to his essential thought. "If there is a theme to this journal," Wilber writes, "it is that body, mind, and the luminosities of the soul—all are perfect expressions of the Radiant Spirit that alone inhabits the universe, sublime gestures of that Great Perfection that alone outshines the world."
Available in hardcover, paperback and digital formats.
The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion
There is arguably no more critical and pressing topic than the relation of science and religion in the modern world. Science has given us the methods for discovering truth, while religion remains the single greatest force for generating meaning. Yet the two are seen as mutually exclusive, with wrenching consequences for humanity. In The Marriage of Sense and Soul, one of today's most important philosophers brilliantly articulates how we might begin to think about science and religion in ways that allow for their reconciliation and union, on terms that will be acceptable to both camps.
Available in hardcover, paperback, digital, and audiobook formats.
For More Advanced Readers:
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution
In this tour de force of scholarship and vision, Ken Wilber traces the course of evolution from matter to life to mind and describes the common patterns that evolution takes in all three of these domains. From the emergence of mind, he traces the evolution of human consciousness through its major stages of growth and development. He particularly focuses on modernity and postmodernity: what they mean; how they impact gender issues, psychotherapy, ecological concerns, and various liberation movements; and how the modern and postmodern world conceive of Spirit.
Available in hardcover, paperback, and digital formats.
The Religion of Tomorrow: A Vision for the Future of the Great Traditions
A single purpose lies at the heart of all the great religious traditions: awakening to the astonishing reality of the true nature of ourselves and the universe. At the same time, through centuries of cultural accretion and focus on myth and ritual as ends in themselves, this core insight has become obscured. Here Ken Wilber provides a path for reenvisioning a religion of the future that acknowledges the evolution of humanity in every realm while remaining faithful to that original spiritual vision. For the traditions to attract modern men and women, Wilber asserts, they must incorporate the extraordinary number of scientific truths learned about human nature in just the past hundred years—for example, about the mind and brain, emotions, and the growth of consciousness—that the ancients were simply unaware of and thus were unable to include in their meditative systems.
Available in hardcover, paperback, digital, and audiobook formats.
Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World
Integral Spirituality is being widely called the most important book on spirituality in our time. Applying his highly acclaimed integral approach, Ken Wilber formulates a theory of spirituality that honors the truths of modernity and postmodernity—including the revolutions in science and culture—while incorporating the essential insights of the great religions. He shows how spirituality today combines the enlightenment of the East, which excels at cultivating higher states of consciousness, with the enlightenment of the West, which offers developmental and psychodynamic psychology. Each contributes key components to a more integral spirituality.
Available in hardcover, paperback, and digital formats.
Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy
The goal of an "integral psychology" is to honor and embrace every legitimate aspect of human consciousness under one roof. This book presents one of the first truly integrative models of consciousness, psychology, and therapy. Drawing on hundreds of sources—Eastern and Western, ancient and modern—Wilber creates a psychological model that includes waves of development, streams of development, states of consciousness, and the self, and follows the course of each from subconscious to self-conscious tosuperconscious. Integral Psychology is Wilber's most ambitious psychological system to date and is already being called a landmark study in human development.
Available in paperback and digital formats.
Quantum Questions: Mystical Writings of the World's Great Physicists
Here is a collection of writings that bridges the gap between science and religion. Quantum Questions collects the mystical writings of each of the major physicists involved in the discovery of quantum physics and relativity, including Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Planck. The selections are written in nontechnical language and will be of interest to scientists and nonscientists alike.
Available in paperback, and digital formats.