본문 바로가기
  • Home

Big Mind and Absolute Nonbeing -Ken Wilber’s Spectrum of Consciousness and its End-

  • PHILOSOPHY·THOUGHT·CULTURE
  • 2025, (47), pp.59~80
  • Publisher : Research Institute for East-West Thought
  • Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
  • Received : January 7, 2025
  • Accepted : January 28, 2025
  • Published : January 31, 2025

JoungNae Kim 1 JEONG Se Geun 1

1충북대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Ken Wilber(1949∼) is the founder of Integral Psychology, who claims that consciousness rises step by step and finally reaches its highest level. He sympathizes with Indian ‘brahm a-ātma-ekatva/aikya’(梵我一如) thought, as well as Zen Buddhism. Even if we agree with Wilber's influence on psychology, his excellent function in counseling and therapy, and his profound respect for Eastern traditions, there is still something to be asked from the philosophical point of view. Then, has there never been a senior psychologist who approached this integral way? The first chapter of the Laozi(Daodejing) which Wilber in his 20s was greatly shocked, finds his conclusion in the perfect subject-object matching, the Vedanta philosophy of advaita(non-dual).Laozi presupposes absolute nonbeing that Wilber did not say. Laozi longs for expanding the world into the language of infinity or the indefinite rather than narrowing the world into the language of affirmation like the One. No matter how large the One is, it never goes to absolute nonbeing. The One does not guarantee the openness, enlargement, and endlessness of absolute nonbeing. In that sense, while Wilber wants to integrate ‘everything’ with ‘Big Mind’, Laozi seems to have tried to embrace all kinds of things with absolute nonbeing.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.