The Essential Ken Wilber is a collection of books, and I believe also essays, by Ken Wilber, an author who focuses on psychology, philosophy, and religion. I was first introduced to Ken Wilber by reading his book called No Boundary where he focuses on psychological boundaries which humans set up for themselves which keeps them away from a sense of connection and therefore obviously a sense of happiness as well. What I do like about The Essential Ken Wilber is that it obviously gives a wide variety of Wilber’s thoughts and writings as it spans from numerous books throughout his entire writing career. This collection also manages to avoid redundancy which I believe is one of the criticisms which readers do have about Wilber is that he’s repetitive in his thoughts occasionally, however this book is able to keep the writings quite varied. However, one thing I don’t really like about this book is that it feels very aimless. Whereas a book like No Boundary progressed in a logical manner and eventually culminated into a chapter which one could expect, The Essential Ken Wilber jumps all around topics which can sometimes be distracting and out of place to me. However, this collection does do a good job of placing topics which absolutely need to be read with each other, in order to understood, one after the other. For some people this may not be an issue but for me I do like a sense of direction while reading a book rather than feeling the topic is so scattered. However, I would recommend this to another familiar with Wilber’s works and also even anyone who wants a general overview of what Wilber has to offer, as this book spans a wide range of topics and thoughts. However, my final thought is that although I would recommend this to a reader who is trying to get an overview of Wilber, I think I would actually recommend another one of his books, not a collection, before reading this. My reasoning for this is because you can get very detailed with
Wilber’s thoughts in a normal book whereas with The Essential Ken Wilber, the book may be varied but it also isn’t extremely detailed on a topic as only 3-4 pages are used as excerpts from the original book they come from. Nevertheless, I though this was an enjoying read and despite the brevity of some chapters, where I wanted to know more about, I still felt that reading this book was quite beneficial and I was able to learn quite a lot of information from it.

Rating: 8