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From the home page at penthouse.com:
The least they could have done is to include a proper graphic. You know:
Stop clicking, already.
Had you heard? Adi Da's organization has merged with Tony Alamo's Alamo Foundation to form a new group:
"Remember Da Alamo."
Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.
Just discovered this excellent site: Jesus of the Week.
Well, if Ken Wilber can use the "Q & A" format for an entire book (A Brief History of Everything) and get away with it, I suppose I can be forgiven for using it just this once:
Q: I am left with the feeling that you have condemned Wilber in Stripping the Gurus on the basis of his personal naïvete regarding Adi Da and Cohen, and his missteps in science, but left his core business—psychology, and mapping our interiority—untouched.
A: As I noted in STG, I do not have the background to know whether kw has misrepresented the various fields of psychology which he claims to synthesize, as grotesquely as he has demonstrably done for so many other areas. Christopher Cowan, though, has given many devastating criticisms of Wilber's (mis)representation of Spiral Dynamics® in SDi, and of the high probability that the vaunted Mean Green Meme does not even exist. You may also be aware of Michel Bauwens' suggestion, from last summer, that kw "offers a synthesis not of the whole of spirituality, but of a particular Hindu-Buddhist nondual tradition." The flaws which Cowan and Bauwens point out are exactly consistent with Wilber's documented penchant for misrepresentation, and his ability to "make things up out of thin air." And both of their criticisms relate, of course, to the core of kw's theorizing.
Subtle energies and subtle bodies/auras, too, are also very much tied in to the core of Wilber's model, and have been so from the beginning. For myself, I have never asked for "everything" to be proved before I'll believe it. (By ironic contrast, it's exactly the "true believers" who need to have everything disproved before they'll stop believing in it ... if even then.) But when simple experiments show the high probability of neither subtle energies nor subtle bodies/auras existing (i.e., show that the people who confidently claim to be able to perceive them actually can't), that's clearly a huge blow to any theorizing predicated on their existence (cf. Wilber's references to the various koshas in his early books, and the transpersonal aspects of his objective and inter-objective quadrants now).
So, with all that, I would not at all say that Wilber's psychology- or interior-related theorizing has been left "untouched," even by what's presently in STG, even if the ways in which his model wobbles are left merely implicit, there. And the amount of foolishness in his theorizings can only get worse, the more he hangs around with the likes of Schwartz, Dossey, Sheldrake and Motoyama. Indeed, with his daft endorsing of stuff like the Q-Link pendant, he'll end up as a laughingstock even without any "help." (In his own words: "The Q-Link is a technology that amplifies and clarifies the body's energies. By reducing the noise in any energy field, this technology strengthens and purifies the body's own energies." As Bugs Bunny would say: Whadda maroon.)
Or, as one amazon reviewer put it: "There's a reason why his books are shelved in the New Age section, folks."
As to the mapping of interior states and stages, I quite admire Clare Graves' work in that regard. Indeed, by now I much prefer to see that sort of thing be done without any accompanying metaphysical baggage.
Plus, with Wilber's documented penchant for misrepresentation, I do not believe that anyone should feel confident even in his core mappings of interior states and their supposed correlations to other quadrants, without first going back to the source materials which he presents as supporting his view, and squaring those against what he claims they say.
If I have learned one thing from my own research, it is that those two sides can be poles apart, particularly where kw and his frequently make-believe "theorizings" are concerned.
The BibleHusbands Yahoo! Group mailing list:
This list is for men, not girly men, but real men--men who, after a wonderful steak dinner, would enjoy sitting around the fire at the country club smoking long stogies and, drinking brandy and discussing the issues of the day.
This list is for Christians--not those for whom God and His Word is a passing fancy, but for those committed to the cause of the realization of His Kingdom. This means no Romanists, Mormons, JWs or other cultists. Charasmanaics will not be allowed to post any subjective revelation garbage.
This list is for husbands. If you are not married, you are free to lurk and ask questions, but if you are not married, we do not want your opinions.
Please note that the moderator of this list is a Reformed-bapist Reconstructionist, which means I love in-your-face debate. This also means I will not tolerate members telling me that I must do this or that to be saved, telling me that the Law of God has nothing to say or that men and women are equal. Heresy will be dealt with swiftly. [!]
Any topic is open, from how to treat your wives (a topic we could all use improvement on, I am sure), to the most mundane doctrinal issue, to how to best fix a low flush toilet. As long as we are men appealing to men with the foundation of Biblical truth, I am all for it.
I had not previously been aware that there was any correlation between "low flush toilets" and "Biblical truth" ... but if the shoe fits, verily I say unto thee, wear it.
Purely for my own ego-inflation and gratification ("someone needs a hug"), I've begun compiling a list of links to web pages where Stripping the Gurus is mentioned.
Matthew Dallman's fascinating comments on the mess increasingly surrounding IntegralWilber: Group Think and Reader Response.
Dallman worked intensively as the volunteer art director for Integral University for sixteen months; he knows from whence he speaks. And thus doth he speak of "meanness, vitriol, nastiness, and insult directed by [Wilber] to myself and my wife."
Wilber's dismal treatment of Michel Bauwens (reported by Bauwens in Issue 15 [June 1, 2004] of the Pluralities/Integration newsletter—not posted online, as far as I know) is also worth noting:
I was ... privy, since I was in regular email contact back then, to Wilber's private denunciations of institutes like the California Institute of Integral Studies and the Naropa Institute, schools that I had monitored, visited, and have many highly qualitative [sic] teachers and researchers. It's not that he said that they were imperfect, no, they were 'cesspools' and one would have to stay at all cost away from them. This aggressiveness I personally found disturbing. I started to notice how easily Ken praised works that favorably use his work, he did it with my own magazine Wave, which he highly praised in a note even though he could not possibly read the Dutch-language it was written in, while being so aggressive with those who disagree.
Finally, there was a personal incident. In short, I had sent Ken, whom I considered a friend by then, since I had visited him and interviewed him for four hours, a draft of an essay on the new world of work, which clearly stated that it was inspired by his work, specifically mentioned a series of consultants working in his spirit, then went on to describe the four quadrants, and apply them creatively to my own domain, with notes and references and all. I got back a letter which threatened me with 'exclusion from the network' and even legal consequences for 'intellectual theft'. But how could that be, how could an essay mentioning him, using his method, of which I had send him a draft!!, be constructed as theft, and deserve threats of legal action??? I was deeply hurt, baffled, and entered into an email conversation which did not solve anything fundamentally. Though I got some kind of excuse in the end, he said that he was under pressure and that his 'advisers' had told him to react in that way, he also managed to say that "I didn't understand all his theory". Note that this has become Ken's standard argument against <everybody>. Only a close circle, who seemingly work in secret around him and do not publish their papers yet, are said to fully understand him. It has been promised that these will be published by the Integral Institute for its online university project.
Now what's the big deal? That Ken is just human after all, surely that is not a crime. Hurting the feelings of Michel Bauwens? However, you must remember, this is in the period that Ken wrote the One Taste diary, in which he claims that he is in the process of attaining longer and longer moments of nondual realization. So he is no longer content to claim that he is just a pandit (a 'theoretician' if you like), but a spiritual realiser himself (though he stresses he will never want to be a master himself). He even makes the explicit claim that the different phases of his work (four at that time) represents phases of spiritual maturation as well.
It is during these years that Ken's great enemy started to be the Narcissism of the baby boom generation, that he started saying that the key problem of the world, is not the greed for profit and the ecological destruction, the unsustainable psychology of the new work ethos, or the pauperization of the Third World that results from neoliberalism, no, it is the political correctness of the postmodern academics in the U.S.! Does the bell start to ring? Could it not simply be that my essay's great crime was not to mention him <enough>?? Could his rage not be explained by wounded narcissism, and would that not shed light on the development of his own theory, and his siding with the neoconservatives in the culture wars? On a little side note, a friend of mine, who was trying to make a synthesis of NLP (neuro-linguistic programming) and Spiral Dynamics, and also asked for advice, received a similar email attack ... from Don Beck....
Wilber the "wise, compassionate bodhisattva"? My ass.
But hey, if you had been surrounded for decades by peers who think that leprechauns are real, and who believe (with Roger Walsh) that A Course in Miracles really was dictated by Jesus to Helen Schucman in the mid-'60s (!), wouldn't you, too, be an "Einsteinian spiritual genius" by comparison? Peer review among transpersonal psychologists (and parapsychologists) does not, and will never, work—only a hard-nosed skeptical/scientific review of their invariably unsupportable claims will ever show up the widespread flaws and outright fabrications.
So back at the beginning of February, I saw an advertisement for a CD for the "Daism Research Index" on lightmind.com. Being the eager little researcher that I am, I immediately sent in my PayPal payment for $14.95 U.S. If memory serves, I was then informed, via email, that the disk would be ready around the end of the month, and that if I didn't want to wait that long I could cancel my order.
I'm a patient individual. Sometimes. For stuff like this, I am. But when the CD still hadn't arrived by the middle of April, I decided to follow up on that, with an email to lightmindsupport@lightgate.net on the 15th:
Hello,
I had ordered a copy of the DRI CD Version 1.0 on February 6, 2005 ... and have not yet received that product.
Can you please look into whether it has been shipped, etc.
Thank You, etc.
No response. So on April 20 I sent another:
Re: DRI CD Version 1.0
As I had informed you last week (on April 15, 2005), I have still not received the DRI CD which I had ordered from you on February 6, 2005....
If I have not have received a satisfactory response from you by the end of this week (i.e., by April 22, 2005) to resolve that complaint, I will be contesting the PayPal charge to my credit card at that time.
Sincerely, etc.
Well, 'tis Saturday, and in looking up the PayPal terms for filing claims, I see that those must be filed within 45 days of the payment. And since (d'oh) I've just realized that the money was actually drawn from my bank account, not a credit card, I can't contest the charge there.
So there's nothing I can do to get that money back. All I can do is to tell the sad story, here, of Da Fucka who's taken my $14.95, and how I have nothing to show for it.
Well, the reviews for Stripping the Gurus are in at Sarlo's GuruRatings Yahoo! Group.
From which I quote:
Much fun gossip and dirt on many gurus. ...Alot [sic] of familiar stuff, but some new things as well. The guy doesn't really understand the practices he is writing about, but he is dedicated to the topic. I would say obsessive.
Approaches everything from a scientific perspective and comes across like someone who runs a [sic] interventiion [sic] clinic and is trying to save the world.. [sic] (his world view is probably rationalist techno geeky debunker) Guru ratings [sic] is mentioned.
It amazes me how people who hate gurus are almost more dedicated to them then [sic] their devotees.
He is trying to sell a book, but free content is online.
The Ken Wilbur [sic] expose section is interesting...but not convincing [sic]
A few points:
"Approaches everything from a scientific perspective"? Yep. Without science, we'd all still be believing that Santa Claus and his mythological precursors were real. Without it, we'd all be bowing before the "Virgin apparition" (water stain) on that Chicago underpass, convinced that it was a sign from God. (Hey, when the idiot tenant in the apartment above me left her water on a couple of months ago, that produced a nice beige stain on my ceiling. If I squint, I think I can see Jesus in it.)
"Obsessive" is just how six thousand hours of research looks to persons who evidently slept through spelling class back in elementary school, and still haven't recovered.
"Rationalist techno geeky debunker"? Lucky guess. (The About the Author section for STG online gives my tech background. Good show figuring it out on your own though, guy. Yikes.) Regardless, very good attributes, all.
And the section on Wilber is convincing. (No, it doesn't directly debunk his four-quadrant edifice, though it touches that implicitly, in terms of the probably non-existence of subtle bodies and energies, and thus of his objective and inter-objective quadrants; but it leaves much of the rest of his work and character in tatters.) That's why Frank Visser lists it on his World of Ken Wilber website. That's why Visser has told me via email that he agrees with "most of" my criticisms of Wilber. That's why Ph.D.'s have told me that my analysis of Wilber, via Bohm, is "brilliant and deeply insightful." That's why my chapter on kw in STG was given prominent mention in Issue #63 (April 10, 2005) of Michel Bauwens' Pluralities/Integration newsletter. From which:
[The "Norman Einstein" chapter in Stripping the Gurus] is a rather sharp-edged critique of Wilber, which returns the tables of his way of erroneously interpreting his sources. This is indeed one of the main problems with his approach: his method of "orienting generalisations," of synthesizing a field almost never works, as he takes a minority opinion he endorses, to be the consensus of the field. In this chapter, Wilber's mistaken interpretations on Bohm, on evolution, Carl Jung, and quite a few other issues and authors are dissected. One particularly interesting aspect is the investigation into the less-than-savoury aspects of the gurus that Wilber recommends: Da Free John, Aurobindo, Sri Maharshi, the Mother, Chogyam Trungpa, Vivekananda, Muktananda. After reading it, you will have to agree with [its] rather harsh conclusions....
So, the aforementioned fellow who can't even spell "Wilber"—even after reading a 23,000-word chapter on him, in which his name is explicitly spelled out over three hundred times!—doesn't find my arguments against kw convincing? Too funny. Shall I wail and gnash teeth audibly now, or leave that for later?
Easy way to remember the kw spelling issue: "Wilbur" with a "u" was the loveable pig from Charlotte's Web. "Wilber" with an "e" is the nasty, bald fool who thinks he's a genius, and who was once entered in the Nebraska state fair by his parents, where he won second prize.
He's one hell of an integral pig.
Not to be outdone, another equally insightful poster followed up on the above misled shite, on the same (Yahoo!) forum:
..........Oh man, that is one wretched piece of writing. Reads like a cross between a 12th grade term paper (the form of it) and the National Enquirer (the mood of it).
Well, at least he spelled it all correctly ... though the ten periods are a bit excessive, no? But such reaction, of course, is simply what happens when you try to explain to little boys that Sri Santa Claus doesn't exist. Never has existed. Never will exist. 'Twas all a lie from the beginning. Deal with it. 'Cause what's "wretched" is the sad fact that a significant proportion of our world's population will continue to believe in "Santa Claus" regardless of how much evidence is presented to the contrary, and will easily find reasons to dismiss anyone who challenges their cherished, childish beliefs.
As to the "12th grade term paper" (i.e., frequently block-quoting) form of STG: One need only glance at (and then properly, independently research) Ken Wilber's work to see how, without such direct reference to original sources, one can easily "make things up out of thin air" and have them taken as irrefutable truth. If I hadn't utilized extensive block quotes in STG, these same "experts" would be trashing me for having possibly misrepresented my many obscure and out-of-print sources. So I really can't win, can I? Had Nabokov or Shakespeare himself written an exposé of our world's gurus, someone, somewhere, would have found fault with the writing style! So I'm supposed to do better?
Of course, numerous respected Ph.D.'s have commented much more favorably on STG, as well as on my earlier writings, than the above bozos would grant. Check out, in particular, the unsolicited use of the terms "entertaining," "engaging" and "delightful" to describe my writing style.
(That's why I have non-emotionally-involved readers—i.e., ones who don't need to defend their own involvement in one side or another of the "guru game"—telling me that I'm "one helluva writer," and that the chapters from STG posted online are "amazing stuff." There are, thankfully, people in the world who do get what that book is about.)
But then, what do the informed evaluations of John Horgan, David Lane, Sue Blackmore, Len Oakes, Frank Visser, Michel Bauwens, Ramakrishna scholar Narasingha Sil, world-renowned expert-on-religions Huston Smith, and transpersonal psychologist James Fadiman count against a couple of opinionated, confidently wrong "armchair experts," posting on a Yahoo! forum? (You think Smith and Fadiman would have endorsed my previous "believer" writings if I didn't understand the practices I'm writing about? Not bloodly likely! Regardless, though, STG isn't about the metaphysical theory underlying any given path, or why its practices are "supposed" to work. Rather, it's blatantly about how lives get shattered at the cruel and grandiose hands of fools who are believed by their credulous followers to be "gods in the flesh." All of that's explicitly in the Introduction!)
Odd, though, isn't it, that Buddhists who take the grandiose bodhisattva vow to "save all sentient beings" before accepting nirvana themselves are viewed as the epitome of compassion, while others who work outside of the scourge called religion/spirituality are denigrated as trying to "save the world" in negative ways?
And then there's this fascinating thread on "Strategic Rejection" in cults: http://forum.rickross.com/viewtopic.php?t=477.
Less fascinating are my own attempts at emailing today.
I discovered this morning that Richard Stallman, founder of the GNU Project, has recently joined the Rationalist International group as an Honorary Associate. That group does much debunking of gurus, so I thought: maybe he (Stallman) would be interested in my Stripping the Gurus.
So I mosey on over to his website, and the first email address I find for him is here, kind of on his own "dating site." So I copy that into the address section of the email I'm preparing, and keep on toodling through his pages. And soon, I find another address, @gnu.org. So I copy that one, too, into the address list, and figure I'll sort out later which one to actually send the email to.
Several hours later, I've lined up a bunch of other emails to send out. So I click "Send All."
And as all of those emails are winding their merry binary way across cyberspace to their intended recipients—including both of Stallman's addresses—the bulk-email thought hits me:
"Oh, God. I just spammed the founder of the Free Software Movement!"
Shit.
So if this turns up on slashdot or something, that's my story, and I'm stickin' to it.
Ken Wilber, endorser of the Q-Link.
The man is truly hopeless.
Was made aware of a very cool guru-debunking site today: Guruphiliac.
See it with someone you divinely love, and whom you consider to be "God in the flesh."
Received the absolutely stupidest piece of hate-email today. From some fool named ashiata:
From: Jim Jones people have the wierdest [sic] ideas about "realization" or developement [sic] of being. their preconceptions and the requirements they place upon those with the courage to teach betray their ignorance and lack of depth. this mr. falk, for instance, seems to assume that achieving "holiness" necessarily precipitiates [sic] eschewing sexual relations, drink/drugs, and/or observations of one's own position or that of others. this motherfucker must be some kind of repressed catholic or insecure positivist [?] to assume that his notions of proper behaviour can in any way be applied to the beings he mentions. these are men that are to varying degrees FREE [bullshit!]. they are not bound by the idiotic puritanical limitations to which this wiseacrer [sic] is sentenced for life. what he doesn't notice is that the Men [sic] he references do not wreak destruction. on the whole their influences are positive [bullshit!!], and destructive mostly to what doesn't actually exist—people's illusions. his influence, meanwhile, could be called evil (if such a strong word could rightly be applied to such a non-entity), as it may have the influence of ruining even one person's opportunity to work on himself. [Let's hope it does!]
From: Jim Jones
people have the wierdest [sic] ideas about "realization" or developement [sic] of being. their preconceptions and the requirements they place upon those with the courage to teach betray their ignorance and lack of depth. this mr. falk, for instance, seems to assume that achieving "holiness" necessarily precipitiates [sic] eschewing sexual relations, drink/drugs, and/or observations of one's own position or that of others. this motherfucker must be some kind of repressed catholic or insecure positivist [?] to assume that his notions of proper behaviour can in any way be applied to the beings he mentions. these are men that are to varying degrees FREE [bullshit!]. they are not bound by the idiotic puritanical limitations to which this wiseacrer [sic] is sentenced for life. what he doesn't notice is that the Men [sic] he references do not wreak destruction. on the whole their influences are positive [bullshit!!], and destructive mostly to what doesn't actually exist—people's illusions. his influence, meanwhile, could be called evil (if such a strong word could rightly be applied to such a non-entity), as it may have the influence of ruining even one person's opportunity to work on himself. [Let's hope it does!]
Yep, "Which way to the next Jonestown/D'uh-town/Muktananda-town?"
Of course, if David Lane can be the satanic "Kal force" to loyal followers of the Eckankar group, I suppose I can be an "evil non-entity."
Bwuhahaha!
But no, I don't believe that "holiness" or its absence has anything whatsoever to do with sex, drugs, or rock 'n' roll. As a matter of fact, I don't believe in "holiness" or "realization" at all. Really. Rather, as far as I can tell, those are two of the most heinous lies perpetrated by and on our species. (Okay, in my heart of hearts I'd still prefer a universe in which self-awareness was an essential characteristic of Spirit. And maybe it is; who knows? It's just that most of the figures who reassure us that that's the Way things are, are half the time unable to get the simplest things right, and the other half are clearly just making things up as they go along. You follow that wilber-esque mixture of intellectual dishonesty and gross incompetence at your own great risk.)
And "puritanical"? Moi? Only if puritans can simultaneously be in favor of the legalization of both marijuana and prostitution, as I am. (By contrast, though, I do believe that telemarketing should be illegal. Call me a "Puritan," then.) And incidentally, it's not the positivists who are "insecure"; rather, it's the ones who desperately need to believe that perfectly normal phenomena (e.g., Adi Da's "coronas") are instead paranormal ones, who can't face reality.
But then, there are always dupes, like ashiata, who will be convinced that they are being abused for their own good, even when their "great Gurus" can be conclusively shown to be have faked their "miracles," to have feasted while their followers starved, etc.
So good luck to them. They're gonna need all the help they can get, when the shit hits the fan in whatever destructive communities they're each involved with.
One need not be "puritanical" in order to object to the rape, effective child abuse, and psychological incest which so often enter into the relationships between foolish disciples and their perfect father-figure gurus. One need simply be able to think clearly.
When people do not have a clear idea of harm—and it is very hard to talk about sex and get it right—they accuse others of being Puritans. This is going on all over Buddhism today (Lew Richmond, in [Downing, 2001]).
