Wilber's Rule

Getting home from meditation tonight (and after a lengthy battle with an assignment), I found the following quote by Ken Wilber. It reads

  "I have one major rule: everybody is right. More specifically, everybody—including me—has some important pieces of the truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace."  (Wilbur, 2000)

I love this quote, because it captures a holistic moment. Can you imagine if people walked around believing this? There would likely be fewer disputes in life, and much more harmony. Why? Because I think that people desperately want to very much feel validated in their perspectives. Most of the time, people believe in their hearts that either they are "right" or the other person is "right". There is a very entrenched idea that the world would fall into chaos if people started to admit that perhaps every experience has a certain amount of validity. But quite often there is more chaos if people believe they have to prove something in order to feel that they have validity in the social worlds they inhabit. 

Instead of thinking this way, what would it be like for people to believe that all walks of life and all people have some valid sense of experience or thought that is worth sharing? How would one feel if they just adopted such an attitude into their life? Perhaps they would argue less and be more curious. I also suspect that such an approach might give more room for people to allow each other their own view, while not rejecting themselves or each other outright.


Wilber, K (2000), Collected Works of Ken Wilber, Vol III