Ken Wilbur has been called the “Einstein of consciousness”––and though he’s countered this humbly (“it’s like being called the tallest building in Kansas”) he indeed is at the cutting edge of spiritual science. Author of books that include Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, The Spectrum of Consciousness, Up from Eden, and Grace and Grit, Wilbur’s latest project is Integral Naked, a website brimming with largely unedited interviews and dialogues with spiritual teachers and practitioners from around the world.
The site is an offshoot of Wilbur’s Integral Spiritual Center, a think-tank that merges knowledge from a variety of disciplines to find overarching cosmic truths.
Updated several times a week, users can download talks with titles like “Does Physics Prove God?” “Seven Levels of Erotica,” and “Consciousness and Healing.” Speakers range from Buddhist scholar Lama Surya Das to rabbi Marc Gafni to music producer Rick Rubin––not exactly a wide range in terms of gender and race (there are few women or minorities on the site). The diversity here lies in the divergent fields of thought.
Users pay $10 for unlimited access, but for some reason podcasts––which only cover a small percentage of the content––are free. I just listened to psychedelic artist Alex Grey (the guy who draws people as glowing energetic grids––his posters can be found in almost any Dead-lover’s dorm room) talk about discovering an alternate realm of reality while on LSD thirty years ago. His girlfriend began drawing his hallucination before he described it. He’s been painting it ever since.