Kenneth Earl Wilber II (born January 31, 1949, Oklahoma City, USA) is an American philosopher and psychological theorist. His work focuses mainly on creating an “integral theory of consciousness” in which the insights of mysticism, postmodernism, science and systems theory come together to form a coherent picture of the cosmos. In Kosmic Consciousness, Wilber states that he considers himself a storyteller and a mapmaker; his stories address universal questions and his maps integrate various perspectives of the cosmos.
Although he was at one time a major proponent of the transpersonal school of psychology, he has since disassociated himself from it. In 1998 he founded the Integral Institute, a think-tank for studying issues of science and society in an integral way. He has been a pioneer in the development of Integral psychology and Integral spirituality. It suggests that all human knowledge and experience can be placed in a four-quadrant grid, along the axes of “interior-exterior” and “individual-collective”. According to Wilber, it is one of the most comprehensive approaches to reality, a meta-theory that attempts to explain how academic disciplines and every form of knowledge and experience fit together coherently.