Integral Meditation
Mindfulness as a Way to Grow Up, Wake Up, and Show Up in Your Life
To be whole, human beings need to both “wake up” and “grow up.” But while spiritual practices leading to waking up have been around for thousands of years, the stages of growing up have only been discovered by Western schools of developmental psychology within the last one hundred. According to Ken Wilber, no path or practice has ever adequately brought the two together, leaving humans effectively “broken” or “incomplete.” Think of spiritual masters who have never really “grown up” morally or psychosexually, or intelligent, successful people who are not Awakened or Enlightened.
Integral Meditation, which Wilber calls “the most effective growth and development program that exists in the world at this time,” combines practices for waking up from the ancient wisdom traditions (such as mindfulness) with practices, techniques, and thought-provoking evolutionary viewpoints (such as Integral Theory) for the major stages of growing up. The combination brings to light the hidden internal maps that lead to personal and planetary disaster, makes them conscious and objective, and instructs us in how we can uproot and replace them. The result, Wilber affirms, will be a profound shift to a healthier, happier, more authentic life, which he describes as seeming like “a series of exuberant flow states.”
Even more exciting and hopeful is Wilber’s assertion that the arrival of 10 percent of the world’s population at such a state will ignite humanity’s most profound tipping point.
Reviewed by
Kristine Morris
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