Excerpts from Ken Wilber, Speaking of Everything

"For the ultimate or non-dual paths, the primary reorientation is take up a spiritual practice. And learn to cultivate that awareness which is not a change of state. Which is ever-present noticing, through all changes of state, waking, dreaming, and deep sleep. There is that timeless, unchanging, presence, that is your actual birthright and your original face.

The only way you can recognize that, again, because it's so utterly, utterly, simple, the only way you can recognize it is to exhaust all of your other options, until literally it is the only thing left staring you in the face, and then you go, 'Wow, that's embarrassing. I've only been looking at it for fifteen billion years now and I didn't quite recognize it.'

Take up a spiritual practice. It can be Vipassana, Zen, centering prayer, yoga ... the shamanic material will work but you really have to make sure you don't just get caught up in phenomenal passing states... A lot of nature mystics and shamanic states come and they go. That's not the ever-present self. The ever-present self does not come, and it does not go. It's fully present right now, and it witnesses these states that come and go. If you just merely get it associated with phenomenal states, that's fine, but it's not realization. ...You can do it through shamanic or nature mysticism but you have to be careful not to merely confuse some gross change in state with the unborn or the ever-present.

So take up a spiritual practice and make that real. That's the only thing that will unravel the mystery of life and death and pain. And while you're doing that, decide what you want to do in the manifest realm.

Now, the ultimate injunction for the non-dual realization is not that you can get to a state where you have a non-dual awareness, but that there is something about your state right now that is already one hundred percent aware of it...

So all we're going to do is keep pointing to it until you see it. We're not going to bring anything into existence that isn't already here one hundred percent. If you hear my voice, and see the table, and you're noticing sounds that are going on, that is the enlightened mind. That is one hundred percent of the enlightened mind.

The only reason that you don't go 'Wow, I see it,' is that you are too distracted by the objects that are occurring in that mind moment to moment. You focus on the objects passing by and you forget who the actual seer is or the witness of these objects, and so that appears that it is not present, but in fact it is ever present.

Even if somebody has a very powerful and permanent realization of the non-dual ever-present mind, they still have to manifest and express that through their conventional personality and their conventional philosophy. The more balanced and integral and full-bodied their philosophy, the more adequate they are gong to be in conveying it and helping to make sense of the world. It doesn't really help a whole lot to have a great understanding of the nature of the mind if you can't convert that into educational policies, or policies for business or politics or for the real-world where real human beings live.

So, in addition to having an understanding of and an awakening to the absolute, non-dual, nature of the mind, you want to have an expression that is as integral and comprehensive as possible because it is going to be more effective in the real world. In the best of all possible worlds, we want to combine both, the relative and the non-dual, to give a more comprehensive approach."