Ken Wilber

Wilber married Terry "Treya" Killam who was shortly thereafter diagnosed with breast cancer. After Treya died in January 1989, their joint experience was recorded and published in the book, Grace and Grit.

He now lives in Denver, Colorado, and works at the Center for World Spirituality, which he co-founded. He has stated that he has a debilitating illness called RNase Enzyme Deficiency Disease.

Kenneth Earl Wilber II was born on January 31, 1949 in Oklahoma City. As an only child he had a relatively happy child hood as his parents allowed him to do largely as he pleased.

His father worked for the air force and the family never settled in one place for long which called for much adaptability on his part. He attended high school in Great Falls, Montana.

At high school, he was called ‘the brain’ for always topping the class which he did not relish as he was keen to be popular, and downplayed his intellectual talent.

In 1967, he enrolled as a pre-med student at Duke, but left it to complete a bachelor's degree in chemistry and biology and a master's degree in biochemistry from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln.

In 1973, Wilber completed his first book ‘The Spectrum of Consciousness’, a groundbreaking synthesis of religion, philosophy, physics, and psychology which became the basis for all subsequent attempts at integrating psychology and spirituality.

‘No Boundary’, published in 1979, is a simple and comprehensive guide to the types of psychologies and therapies available from Eastern and Western sources to help the reader understand their nature and practice.

‘The Atman Project’, published in 1980, traces human development from infancy into adulthood and beyond, into those states described by mystics and spiritual adepts and hints at the direction human beings takes toward transcendence.

In 1982, ‘The Holographic Paradigm and other Paradoxes’, a collection of essays and interviews, was published, and looked at how holography and the holographic paradigm relate to the fields of consciousness, mysticism and science.

A key idea in his approach is the holon. He observed that it seems every entity/ concept shares a dual nature: as a whole in itself, and as a part of some other thing. In his 1995 book ‘Sex, Ecology, Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution’, he outlines approximately twenty tenets that characterize all holons. These tenets form the basis of Wilber's model of manifest reality.

‘Sex, Ecology, Spirituality’ or SES, his 1995 magnum opus, shows modern ‘philosophical naturalism’ insufficiency as an explanation of being, evolution, and the meaning of life and wants the vision-logic approach to replace modernism.

He introduced the iconic AQAL model, with AQAL standing for all quadrants, all levels, all lines, all states, and all types, signifying the most basic repeating patterns of reality and ensuring a comprehensive solution.