The Atman Project – A Transpersonal View of Human Development

By Ken Wilber.

240 Pages | First Quest 1980, second edition 1996 | Softcover | Quest Books, U.S.A. | ISBN: 0835607305.

The Atman Project is widely hailed as the first psychology, that succeeds in uniting East and West, conventional and contemplative, orthodox and mystical, into a single, coherent framework. This essential introduction to Ken Wilber's ideas on the evolution of human consciousness feature a new Foreword linking this work to Wilber's current thinking.

From Chapter 4 - 'The Membership Self (p. 29):

" For a sorcerer, reality, or the world we all know, is only a description. For the sake of validating this premise Don Juan concentrated the best of his efforts into leading me to a genuine conviction that what I held in mind as the world at hand was merely a description of the world; a description that had been pounded into me from the moment I was born. He pointed out that everyone, who comes into contact with a child is a teacher, who incessantly describes the world to him, until the moment when the child is capable of perceiving the world as it is described. According to Don Juan, we have no memory of that portentous moment, simply because none of us could possibly have had any point of reference to compare it to anything else . . . For Don Juan, then, the reality of our day-to-day life consists of an endless flow of perceptual interpretations which we, the individuals who share a specific membership, have learned to make in common. "