Biography
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Born
31 January 1949 (age 76)
An American integral thinker and author.
Ken Wilber was born on January 31, 1949 in Oklahoma City, OK. In 1967 he enrolled as a pre-med student at Duke University, and almost immediately experienced a disillusionment with what science had to offer. He became inspired by Eastern literature, particularly the Tao Te Ching, which catalyzed his conversion to Buddhism. He left Duke, enrolled in the University of Nebraska, and completed a bachelor's degree with a double major in chemistry and biology.
In 1973, Wilber completed his first book, The Spectrum of Consciousness, in which he sought to integrate knowledge from disparate fields. After rejections by more than twenty publishers it was finally accepted in 1977 by Quest Books, and he spent a year giving lectures and workshops before going back to writing. He also helped to launch the journal ReVision in 1978.
In 1983, Wilber was married for a second time, this time to Terry (Treya) Killam who was shortly thereafter diagnosed with breast cancer. From the fall of 1984 until 1987, Wilber gave up most of his writing to focus on caring for her. Treya died in January, 1989, and their joint experience was recorded in the book Grace and Grit (1991).
Subsequently, Wilber wrote Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (SES), (1995), the massive first volume of a proposed Kosmos Trilogy. A Brief History of Everything (1996) was the non-footnoted, popularized summary of SES in the form of an imagined, extended interview. The Eye of Spirit (1997) was a compilation of articles he had written for the journal ReVision on the relationship between science and religion. Throughout 1997 he had kept journals of his personal experiences, which were published in 1999 as One Taste, a Buddhist term for cosmic or unitary consciousness. Over the next two years his publisher, Shambhala Publications, took the unusual step of releasing eight re-edited volumes of his Collected Works. In 1999, he finished Integral Psychology and wrote A Theory of Everything (2000). In A Theory of Everything Wilber attempts to bridge business, politics, science and spirituality and show how they integrate with theories of developmental psychology, such as Spiral Dynamics. His book, Boomeritis (2002), is a novel which attempts to expose the egotism of his generation.
Since 1987, Wilber has lived in Denver, Colorado, where he is working on his Kosmos trilogy and overseeing the work of the Integral Institute.
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