Beyond postmodern spirituality: Ken Wilber and the Integral approach

The American philosopher Ken Wilber has taken on a sizeable challenge by trying to unsnarl the modern world-knot and its secular worldview. In the course of his almost forty years of predominantly solitary study (he has worked outside academia for the best part of his career) and writing, Wilber has produced a body of work that spans from consciousness studies to sociology and anthropology, to mysticism and to different fields of philosophy, psychology and comparative religion. The main theme running through his writings is the concept of Kosmos, the universe of matter, life, mind and spirit, that he seeks to restore and bring back both to our vocabulary and to our everyday experience of reality. This article examines Ken Wilber's Integral theory.