Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber is a preeminent scholar of the Integral stage of human development. He is an internationally acknowledged leader, founder of Integral Institute, and co-founder of Integral Life.

If you haven’t already heard of him, Ken Wilber is one of the most important philosophers in the world today.  He is the most widely translated academic writer in America, with 25 books translated into some 30 foreign languages.  Ken Wilber currently lives in Denver, Colorado, and is still active as a philosopher, author, and teacher, with all of his major publications still in print. 

What makes Ken Wilber especially relevant in today’s world is that he is the originator of arguably the first truly comprehensive or integrative philosophy, aptly named “Integral Theory”.  As Wilber himself puts it: “I'd like to think of it as one of the first believable world philosophies...” Incorporating cultural studies, anthropology, systems theory, developmental psychology, biology, and spirituality, it has been applied in fields as diverse as ecology, sustainability, psychotherapy, psychiatry, education, business, medicine, politics, sports, and art.

"If ordinary people don't perceive that our grand ideas are working in their lives then they can't develop the higher level of consciousness, to use a term that American philosopher Ken Wilber wrote a whole book about... The problem is the world needs to be more integrated, but it requires a consciousness that's way up here, and an ability to see beyond the differences among us."
-President Bill Clinton

Wilber explains the need for an Integral Approach in the following way: In our current post-modern world, we possess an abundance of methodologies and practices belonging to a multitude of fields and knowledge traditions. What is utterly lacking however, is a coherent organization, and coordination, of all these various practices, as well as their respective data-sets. What is needed is an approach that moves beyond this indiscriminate eclectic-pluralism, to an “Integral Methodological Pluralism” — driving toward a genuine “theory of everything” that helps to enrich and deepen every field through an understanding of exactly how and where each one fits in relation to all the others. Through the Integral approach, we reveal the previously unseen possibilities for a better, more compassionate, and more sustainable future for all of us.

In short, the Integral Approach is the coherent organization, coordination, and  harmonization of all of the relevant practices, methodologies, and experiences, available to human beings.  Ken Wilber states “You can’t [realistically] honor various methods and fields, without showing how they fit together. That is how to make a genuine world philosophy.”

The twenty-first century literally has three choices: Aristotle, Nietzsche, or Ken Wilber.”
– Jack Crittenden Ph.D., author of Beyond Individualism

Ken Wilber is also the founder of the Integral Institute, which is the first organization fully dedicated to advancement and application of the Integral Approach in relation to contemporary global issues. It was formed in collaboration with over 200 scholars and experts, specializing in education, politics, business, medicine, psychology, spirituality, as well as, law and criminal justice. The Integral Institute is currently partnered with Fielding Graduate University.

In 2007 Wilber co-founded Integral Life, a social media-hub dedicated to sharing the integral vision with the world wide community, as well as documenting and catalyzing the progress of the integral movement.

“The most comprehensive philosophical thinker of our times.”
–Tony Schwartz, the president, founder, and CEO of The Energy Project, and the author of What Really Matters: Searching for Wisdom in America

Tami Simon

Tami Simon is the founder of Sounds True, a multi-media publisher dedicated to disseminating spiritual wisdom. Over their 22 year history, Sounds True has produced over 600 titles, been nominated twice for the Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing companies, and is North America's leading publisher of spoken-word spiritual teachings.

In 1985, at age 22, Tami Simon started Sounds True, now a multi-media publisher, with a dream, a tape recorder, and a $50,000 inheritance she received upon the death of her father. Though she had no business experience and only a vague idea of what she wanted the company to be, Tami had her guiding principle strongly in place: to “disseminate spiritual wisdom.”

In the early days, Tami began by recording conferences and interviews with teachers like Ram Dass and Stephen Levine. She broadcasted portions of these recordings on a radio show that she hosted on Boulder County Public Radio, and then made the cassettes of the entire recordings available for purchase.

As the years passed, Sounds True established their popular direct mailing catalog and in 1990, moved away from conference recordings to audio programs recorded in a studio setting. This led to the evolution of Sound True’s signature style—unscripted recordings that capture the charisma, energetic transmission and “living wisdom” of the teacher.

In the years to follow, Sounds True expanded into bookstores, developed audio learning courses, engaged in profound donation programs including the prison library project, began distributing spiritual and healing music, produced its first videos on spiritual practice, made ownership in the company available to long-term employees, launched a book publishing division, made downloadable content available, and recently launched its first live webstream event.

Twenty-two years, over 600 titles, and 2 million catalogs per year later Tami has grown Sounds True into North America’s leading publisher of spoken-word spiritual teachings, and one of the world's very first organizations to operate along genuinely Integral principles, with the emphasis on "multiple bottom lines" of purpose, profit, people, and planet.