One Taste

The Journals of Ken Wilber

Year: 1999 (rev. 2000) · Format: Book

Description

A year of Wilber's personal journals — daily reflection, meditation notes, and commentary on contemporaries — giving a more informal, first-person view of his life and practice than his theoretical books.

In-Depth Overview

One Taste is structured as a year of dated journal entries (drawn from around 1997), mixing three things in no particular order from one entry to the next: reports from Wilber's own daily meditation practice, informal restatements of his theoretical positions (pitched much more casually than in the systematic books), and commentary — sometimes warm, sometimes combative — on contemporary teachers, critics, and public figures he crosses paths with. The title refers to the nondual state of consciousness in which the ordinary distinction between witnessing awareness and everything witnessed collapses — "one taste" — and the book is less an argument for that state than an attempt to show, entry by entry, what a working contemplative life oriented around it actually looks like day to day.

It's the most personal and least systematic of the "theory" books, closer in spirit to Grace and Grit than to SES, and gives a clearer sense of Wilber's personality — wit, combativeness with critics, self-deprecation, genuine practice discipline — than anything in the more formal work. Useful as a counterweight to the density of SES and Integral Psychology: the same underlying claims, but seen from the inside of a practicing life rather than laid out as a system.

Notes

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