Shambhala: Several of us were at a study group for A Brief History of Everything, and instead of talking about the ideas in the book, everybody seemed to want to talk about you, your private life, your....

Ken Wilber: I hear that fairly often.

Shambhala: Why this intense interest in you as a person? We typed in "Ken Wilber" in the search engine Excite, and there were 363,000 entries. If you read 100 a day, it would take you ten years to read everything about you on the Net. Why this interest?

Ken Wilber: I’m not sure exactly. But I suppose there are several reasons. To begin with, I don’t attend conferences, give lectures or seminars, or in any way appear in public as a teacher. I think this creates a certain atmosphere of curiosity and therefore interest. You know, what’s this guy really like? Also, I have....

Shambhala: Why don’t you give lectures or teach?

Ken Wilber: Well, when I first started writing, I did so. I wrote The Spectrum of Consciousness when I was 23, and for about a year and a half I taught courses on it. But then I realized that I could either teach what I had written yesterday, or write something new. So I chose the latter. Unfortunately, I have never been able to mix the two—teaching and writing. I wish I could, but it seems beyond me. Writing is so very intense and time-consuming that it takes all I’ve got to do it well, or anyway, try to do it well.

 Shambhala: So your "hermit" style generates a lot of curiosity.

Ken Wilber: I think so. There are also some negative reasons. In the last three books (Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; Brief History; and The Eye of Spirit) I included a handful of polemical footnotes severely chastising some of the more regressive and flatland trends in spiritual studies, including some of the trends in deep ecology, retro-Romanticism, astrology, neoJungianism, ecofeminism, neopaganism, systems theory, and so on. Many of these theorists became enraged, and they have generated a great deal of attention and publicity for these books. This has helped sales no end, but it has really annoyed them, and so some of the interest in my work is motivated by these less than happy folks.

Shambhala: But they still read you. Sam Bercholz, the president of Shambhala, says that "Wilber’s fans love him; his enemies love to read him."

Ken Wilber: I think people are starved for a truly holistic and genuinely integral approach to the world—in psychology, in spirituality, in politics, in education. My work is only one approach to integral studies, but I think people respond very strongly to its general thrust.

 Shambhala: So you don’t think it has anything to do with you?

Ken Wilber: But, you know, why should it? The ideas stand or fall on their own. I’m just not fascinating enough as a person to generate all this interest. I have half the wisdom that my fans think and half the vices that my enemies imagine. I believe the bulk of the interest is driven by a sincere interest in integral studies, and people use my work as a springboard for their own ideas, practices, and views.

Shambhala: But how do you handle all the gossip that gets generated?

Ken Wilber: Well, as I said, I’m not nearly the saint some of my fans imagine and I’m nowhere near the devil my detractors wish, so you simply take both of those with a grain of salt. I realize that this country is personality driven, not idea driven, and so many people would rather talk about me instead of my ideas. And so to some extent you expect this and you roll with it. But really, I don’t want the readers’ love, and I certainly don’t need their hate. My only hope is that you take the books and use those ideas that make sense to you, and reject those that don’t. Basically, I’m just trying to create an integral overview that might help you in your own studies or practices.

Shambhala: Are there any institutions or universities in this country that you recommend where students can enroll in integral studies?

Ken Wilber: Even a decade ago, there were very few. But nowdays you can, at most universities, with the help of a sympathetic adviser, put together a program of integral studies. I outline some of these options in The Eye of Spirit, and interested students might want to consult that.

Shambhala: What about alternative learning centers such as The California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) or The Naropa Institute?

Ken Wilber: The Naropa Institute is actually coming along very nicely. For a long time it was sort of lost in the Sixties, dominated by a regressive, retro-Romantic, retribalizing, prerational orientation, but recently....

Shambhala: Prerational?

Ken Wilber: Yes, the confusion of feelings with spiritual awareness.

Shambhala: Spiritual awareness isn’t feelings?

Ken Wilber: No, it is not feelings, it is the awareness of feelings. And that awareness itself is free of feelings and free of thoughts, and allows both feelings and thoughts to float by, just as clouds float by in the emptiness of the sky. But if you confuse experiential feelings with that emptiness, then you will confuse emotionalism and sentimentalism with spirit, and this is often the first step on a regressive slide into the unending world of your own subjective fascination. You don’t transcend the self, you simply feel the self intensely, and this is called "spiritual." This is a bit of a mess, really.

 Shambhala: You were on Naropa’s Board of Directors for a decade!

Ken Wilber: Like I don’t remember. Oy! Many of us, particularly Lex Hixon and I, tried to turn this situation around, to no avail. But recently there has been a growing awareness at Naropa that there is a difference between prerational feeling and transrational awareness, and they are moving, slowly, to implement more transpersonal and transrational and truly integral programs. I’m particularly impressed with their Transpersonal Psychology Department.

Shambhala: In fact, we heard you were actually giving seminars there.

Ken Wilber: Well, twice a month I invite all the students and the faculty to come to my house for three- or four-hour seminars, yes. I tell myself that this keeps my record clean. You know, I’m not really attending a conference or whatnot, I’m just having some students over to my house.

 Shambhala: Why did you start doing this?

Ken Wilber: Because alternative education in this country is at a crucial turning point. For several decades the counter-cultural and "new paradigm" thinkers imagined, with good reason, that they were fighting a lonely battle against conventional education. But in the last five years or so, everything has profoundly changed. Mainstream institutions from Harvard to Stanford are now quite open to integral studies, consciousness studies, and so on. The Journal of Consciousness Studies is as mainstream as you can get, with advisors from John Searle to Daniel Dennett. And these organizations are doing absolutely first-rate and superb work. So much so that the alternative education centers, such as CIIS and Naropa, have been left in the dust. You can simply find much more exciting and profound work in consciousness studies being done outside of CIIS and Naropa and other alternative centers—being done by the mainstream!
     So either the alternative centers will wake up to this fact—they still tend to picture themselves as fortresses of truth against the hordes of mainstream philistines—or they will become increasingly anachronistic. I believe the Transpersonal Department at Naropa has at least a chance of moving forward, and so I am trying to lend a little bit of a helping hand. But, of course, none of this is guaranteed. We will simply have to wait a year or two and see how things turn out.

 Shambhala: How do you respond to the various critiques of your work, both positive and negative?

Ken Wilber: How do you mean?

Shambhala: Everybody seems to be writing critiques of Ken Wilber lately. Some of them are very positive, and many of them are angry, even vitriolic. How do you respond?

Ken Wilber: Well, there’s not much I can do.

Shambhala: Do read all of them? You know, some guy posted a ten-part critique of your work on the Net. Did you read it?

Ken Wilber: I’m afraid not. As you said, if I read all these things it would take me ten years.

Shambhala: Just as well. We all thought the ten-part critique was really mediocre. There’s a book coming out called something like "Ken Wilber and the Future of Transpersonal Inquiry." What do you think about that?

Ken Wilber: Well, fine. But here’s the thing. I would like to be able to engage all these discussions—just as I would like to enter various chat rooms on the Net or attend some of the conferences and study groups--but alas I just can’t. I can focus on writing, or I can get lost in wonderfully fun but endless conversations and produce nothing new at all. I count on those people who enjoy my work to understand this.

Shambhala: But you do listen to criticism.

Ken Wilber: Oh definitely. I get tons of it, one way or another. If I don’t directly read it myself, I have friends and colleagues who alert me to the more thoughtful criticisms. I always take those very seriously, and one way or another, I always try to work those into my writing. Really, I’m not actually a hermit! I’m in touch with stacks of people all over the world; I just don’t go to conferences, that’s all.

Shambhala: Several of us heard that you don’t go to conferences because you have a fear of flying.

Ken Wilber: Bull’s eye.

Shambhala: Really?

Ken Wilber: Come on, guys. My father was in the Air Force, and I grew up with an unnatural trust of big metal things that fly. I happen to love to fly.

Shambhala: In fact, you just flew to Manhattan. What’s up?

Ken Wilber: Yes, I went there to participate in the sale of my latest book, The Integration of Science and Religion. We—well, my agent--sent it to eight mainstream publishers, and since all eight wanted it, we got involved in an intense—and totally fun—auction. But again, I think the real point is that the mainstream world is now very much interested in topics and books that even a decade ago it would not touch. Things have really changed out there.

Shambhala: When is the book coming out?

Ken Wilber: Next January, from Random House.

Shambhala: Random House distributes Shambhala books.

Ken Wilber: Yes. I should say that Shambhala is still my favorite book publisher. The only reason I didn’t publish The Integration of Science and Religion with Shambhala is that I deliberately wrote this book for the mainstream, liberal, establishment media, and they get very nervous with funny foreign spooky names like "Shambhala." So for this book, I decided, with Shambhala’s blessing, to deal with civilians. I think it will be a good litmus test for just how much interest there is for integral studies out there in the real world.

Shambhala: Well then, stay tuned!