Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book was written as a summary of the work presented in Sex Ecology, Spirituality and was intended for a more popular audience. I recommend it as the best first Wilber book, as a relatively accessible introduction to his thought. That said, this is not a popular market "spirituality" book. There is a lot of meat here. I am among those who think Ken Wilber is one of the great thinkers of our time. His great contribution to world thought is as an integrator of a staggering breadth of philosophical thought, psychological research and accounts of mystical experience. He maintains that each of the wisdom traditions and methods of inquiry into human experience has at least some valid contribution to make. He then sets about the daunting task of finding the ground upon which they all can be said to agree and integrating them into a theoretical structure that can be used to understand how, though no single discipline can present the whole truth, all can deliver a piece of it. For example, it is not that neuroscience is right and mysticism is wrong or vice versa. They are both right but incomplete. There really are neurons that can be observed to behave in certain ways. But that is not, and cannot be, all there is to say about human experience. Wilber succeeds establishing an integral theory of consciousness that draws from the wisdom of all the traditions of inquiry to a greater extent than any other thinker I have read. I have read nine of Wilber's books so far, and I think this is the best one to start with, if you are interested in looking into his work. For those who have read some of his other work, this is a good, succinct overview of his system that can be a useful look at the forest when you get immersed into some of the more detailed material about the trees.