Blog — December, 2005

McDonald's Corp. will begin selling skateboards and bikes bearing the fast-food company's brand in a new effort to get kids to burn off burgers and fries with exercise. (more)

Sk8er Clown

He was a clown
She was a punk
Can i make it any more nutritious?
He had red hair
She worked the front
Couldn't be more suspicious
Big floppy shoes
She'd never tell, secretly she wore red shoes as well
All her McFriends
Honked his big nose
Wished they could wear those bright, baggy clothes

Ronald McSk8er Clown
Turned her world upside down
But he wasn't good enough for her
Blond polyester brat
Do you want fries with that?
6 bucks an hour is all it's worth

Forthcoming serialization of Jeff Meyerhoff's Bald Ambition on integralworld.net.

"We have all these exciting TV shows about medicine, like ER, and forensics with the CSI shows, but why can't we have a show with the same energy and excitement about engineers?" [new U of Toronto Engineering dean Cristina Amon] said. (more)

Yeah, if we have ER, why can't we have ... IT?

The excitement....

"Oh my god, the server's blue-screened. I need a Ctrl-Alt-Delete, stat!"

The adventure....

"Ha! Found it! So much for that memory leak! Now let's see if this'll compile."

The romance....

"Hey, I just downloaded a wallpaper of Anna Nicole Smith from back when she was a topless dancer! Take a look!"

We already have engineers and programmers in entertainment; it's called the Dilbert comic strip. Good luck translating that to prime-time. And yet....

My recent experiences with the people running the Canada Council for the Arts, in applying for a Creative Writing (Emerging Writer) Grant for my next book:

[December 16, 2005]

Dear Andreé,

Thank you for your response to my inquiry. However, I there are several points in it which I would like to address:

"your first book was published with a print-on-demand e-publisher that is not recognized as a literary, professional publisher"

Blue Dolphin absolutely is "recognized as a literary, professional publisher": they have had listings in many years (e.g., in the '90s) of the annual Writer's Market, for example. That directory, in fact, is where I first encountered them. Beginning a few years ago, they have indeed published some of their books as print-on-demand, simply for the low volume of their anticipated sales and associated print runs. But many other titles of theirs are printed on traditional offset presses: their publishing "mission" has not otherwise changed. And they are certainly not a mere e-publisher: they have existed since the mid-'70s, well prior to even the notion of e-publishing. (I am not sure what you mean by "e-publishing" in relation to Blue Dolphin: To my knowledge they do no eBooks at all.)

As you know, a publisher may choose to not be listed in Writer's Market for any number of reasons, including wishing to stem the tide of queries and over-the-transom manuscripts they receive. If they ARE listed there, however, no one can reasonably dismiss them as purportedly not being recognized as a literary, professional publisher. Blue Dolphin has been listed there.

"Your first book is on personal growth. This is also why your application is not eligible."

My first book is definitely NOT on personal growth. It is a work of original philosophy, drawing from Eastern religious sources, concerning the nature of free will and consciousness, and the esoteric meaning of mythology. It has been endorsed as such by two of the leading Ph.D.'s in the field of transpersonal psychology, both of whom are members of the Board of Editors of The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. (Just because a book is written on New Age subjects, and/or covers the deep theory underlying meditation-- without in any way being a "how to meditate" book--does not make it a "personal growth" book.) The president and publisher (Paul Clemens) of Blue Dolphin Publishing, too, is a member of the same journal's Board of Editors. (The University of Toronto carries that journal, by the way: it, too, is a recognized academic publication.)

When I spoke to you on the phone in February of 2005 regarding my application for the previous year's grant deadline (deadline October 1, 2004), it was to clear up the reason for rejection of that application, which was that I had included a writing resumé, rather than a business-world, "professional" resumé. (Judging from the February date at which the application was finally rejected, it got well into the decision-making process. It would surely not have gotten to that point had its list of publications--i.e., my first book--not passed your initial vetting.) At that time, the question of the eligibility of my first book was explicitly discussed by you and me, and I was assured by you that the book qualified as having been done by a recognized, professional publishing house. In fact, on that basis (i.e., of that book being listed as my one professional publication in that year's grant application), you explicitly and congenially encouraged me to apply again for a grant in the coming year.

I can well believe that you would not ordinarily assure the eligibility of any book merely on the basis of a phone call, without seeing a full application. When you called me last February in response to my letter to you (which you will surely have a record of on file), however, you had indeed seen the relevant application for that year before assuring me, at that time, that the first book qualified.

I will look forward to receiving your response to this information. My application deserves to be considered in this year's grant-awarding process.

Thank You,

Geoffrey Falk

Of course, I didn't get a response to that until I sent a follow-up email on December 21, asking for the contact information for her superior/supervisor at the Canada Council.

In a head-to-brick-wall, fifteen-minute phone conversation last Thursday morning, then, that supervisor claimed that they had done a lot of research for my file ... and then proceeded to bring up over half a dozen points which, had they done any research at all, he would have known better on. ("A professional publisher would have a standard author royalty contract." Yes, Blue Dolphin does; it's not a vanity publisher. "An eligible publisher would send out an annual catalog to bookstores." Yes, they do. "The publisher's book-covers need to be of a fully professional qualify." well, of all the wonky things about Blue Dolphin [including the fact that I have yet to receive my royalty statement for the first half of 2005, for whatever innocent or less-than-innocent reason], it is not their book covers that are lacking. [Their website is a complete embarrassment, though; no question there.] "A qualifying publisher would have a distribution network in place, with recognized distributors." Yeah, they do.) So finally, I had to gift-wrap for him the idea that even though Blue Dolphin passed on all of those other tests, and is no mere "e-publisher," the fact that less than half of their books are non-self-help, "literary" publications was enough to disqualify them, and my application. If I hadn't done that, we'd still be having that conversation. Of course, those criteria aren't listed anywhere for applicants to see; they're just exercised on every application, apparently. They could save themselves a good amount of time if they were to simply post those rules, explicitly. But then, when has business, much less government, done the efficient thing?

Of course, that still doesn't explain why I was told, by Ms Andreé, back at the beginning of the year, that exactly the same first book qualified, at that time, as being done by a literary, professional publisher. Nor does it in any way explain her more recent out-of-thin-air position that Blue Dolphin is an "e-publisher," distributing only over the Internet, which they absolutely are not.

But then, what do you expect from a government agency? The Ministry of Silly Grants. The people who put the "mental" in "governmental bumbling."

P.S. The JTP is indeed a bad joke, being the leading journal in the field in which Ken Wilber first made his name as an "Einstein." The University of Toronto should have better things to spend its budget on than that waste of paper. Nevertheless, it is a "refereed, academic journal," for what little that is worth.

From the WikiTravel entry for Cairo:

"Avoid the City of the Dead after dark."

I can imagine! That's gotta be spooky!

Commenting on the genesis of "Me and Bobby McGee," [Kris] Kristofferson remembered, "I had just gone to work for Combine Music. Fred Foster, the owner, called me in and said, 'I've got a title for you: "Me and Bobby McKee.'" Bobby was a secretary in Boudleaux Bryant's office, but I thought he said, 'McGee.' He said, 'How's that grab you?' I said, 'How's what grab me?' Foster said, 'The song title. Go write it.' I thought there was no way I could ever write that, and it took me months of hiding from him. One day I was driving between Morgan City and New Orleans. It was raining and the windshield wipers were going. I started coming out with Baton Rouge and other places I was working at the time. I took an old experience with another girl in another country. I had it finished by the time I got to Nashville."

So, "Merry Christmas to Me and Bobby McGee."

As to the "sarcasm" in STG, I've already addressed that issue here, for anyone who wants to do the research before they write.

If we've learned one thing from our psychologists, it's that what we see in others (or in their writing), and are bothered by, is in ourselves first, right? So why do you think, then, that other people, even those who genuinely want and/or believe enlightenment to be real, are able to read STG and thoroughly enjoy its humor, without being put off by the "sarcasm" in it?

If the voice in your head reads STG as having an overwhelming sneering quality ... well, that's the voice in your head, isn't it? Of course, guru-figures from Da, Cohen and Wilber on down do deserve to be mocked and sneered at; no apologies are necessary there. But if you find the tone in STG to be offensive, it says at least as much about you as it does about the book, or about me. (And if you're simply worried that others might be put off by that tone ... well, don't we all have enough other worries, as is?)

I can even believe that a significant percentage of believers, and even some non-believers, would be put off by the tone (whatever we choose to call it) of STG. But I also think that those same people will, to a large extent, be bothered by any disrespect shown toward authority-figures. And if you think STG would be easier to read without the humor in it, you're really fooling yourself. Even with that levity (not levitation), people who want too much to believe in fairy tales have (wrongly) characterized it as being "unrelentingly negative." (And if you really prefer to sift through the dry, journalistic versions of the original exposés of the likes of Adi Da, Satchidananda, the Maharishi, Sai Baba, Chinmoy, Muktananda and Rajneesh, you can get plenty of those at www.rickross.com. Having waded through that morass myself, I can assure you that you're better off with the summaries in STG.) Either way, nothing's going to change there, in terms of how the book is written; so no point in advising me as to how it might be "improved," OK?

Finally, if you're going to be sending me unsolicited suggestions for the betterment of my work, have the guts to do it with your real name attached. I fully understand why people go under anonymous aliases when standing up against the gurus and cults in this world. But the only "risk" here is being embarrassed by having half-baked ideas shredded in a blog where, if history is any guide, your name will (probably) only be attached to it if you've first insulted me or openly questioned my motivations in writing STG.

Scholargy Custom Publishing.

Suggested tag lines:

"Scholarship and lethargy, together for the new millennium."

"You got your scholarship in my lethargy." "You got your lethargy in my scholarship." "Mmmm! Scholargy!!"

"For those times when you just can't read another page ... Scholargy."

[The story of the woman caught in adultery] was not originally in the Gospel of John. In fact, it was not originally part of any of the Gospels. It was added by later scribes. How do we know this? In fact, scholars who work on the manuscript tradition have no doubts about this particular case. ....[T]he story is not found in our oldest and best manuscripts of the Gospel of John; its writing style is very different from what we find in the rest of John (including the stories immediately before and after); and it includes a large number of words and phrases that are otherwise alien to the Gospel. The conclusion is unavoidable: this passage was not originally part of the Gospel.

—Bart Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, p. 64-5

As Seinfeld's Elaine would say: "Fake, fake, fake, fake!"

Dr. Ehrman, note, is Chair of the University of North Carolina's Department of Religious Studies. No mere "integral expert," he.

Subject: Family Gathering

December 21, 2005

The Falk family gathering this year, which I didn't attend (out-of-province and all):

That's one of my uncles on the floor. Apparently, he just wanted to see how the table was put together.

He seriously does amazing woodworking in his workshop.

Leave it to my extended family to end up "under the table," not from too much alcohol—none of them actually drink—but simply for wanting to see how a piece of furniture is constructed!

---

If you read the "hysterical" link to the bottom of the page you will see a much more sane and reasonable respons [sic] by that same Don Beck Ph.D., as one of the 7 comments. And he has some good points.

What you will find there are far less "good points" from Beck (Ph.D.) than rationalizations on the part of someone (i.e., himself) naïvely buying all the pieces he can of the "Brooklyn Bridge to Enlightenment." From Beck's response:

You criticized my friend Ken Wilber because he endorsed a person in the past, but no longer does. Pray tell what is wrong with that?

Well, one major thing that's wrong with that is that Wilber's 1998 (and earlier) "unendorsement" of Adi Da was so lukewarm and filled with caveats that it should have caused any thinking person to seriously doubt his ability to competently judge in the arena of gurus and their folly. (David Lane spotted that as early as 1996, by the way.) And, in fact, unless you, too, truly believe that Da created that "miraculous corona" around the sun which he claims to have manifested in his (1974) Garbage and the Goddess, you could have figured out, three decades ago, that Da is not what he claims to be: He ain't no avatar of Truth. Yet, in kw's words, from the year 1990: "without any doubt whatsoever, [Da] is the first Western Avatar to appear in the history of the world." How stupid. Some people just never learn. (Wilber didn't take back that belief in 1998; rather, he re-stated his clueless opinion that Da "is one of the greatest spiritual Realizers of all time." If you believe that crap, you probably believe that Santa Claus is one of the greatest shamanic beings of all time, too. [The flying reindeer spirit thingy comes out of Siberian shamanic lore, y'know.] Well, Merry Christmas to you, then.)

1988 is 17 years ago.

Andre van der Braak's eleven years of experiences under Cohen (as documented in Enlightenment Blues) began in 1987. The reported abuse didn't end in 1988. You do the math. More importantly: What do you think might have changed in Cohen's character and treatment of others, between then and now? With what confidence do you say that anything has changed in him? Simply tossing out the vague hope that "people, indeed, change," as Beck does, is beyond foolish, in this context.

I just found your editions "ugly," full of personal gripes and complaints. I have absolutely no way to assess their validity because of the wide variations of emotions and perspectives.

Both Tarlo's Mother of God and van der Braak's book have been in print for some time now. They tell the same story, should you require additional means of assessing the validity of the complaints voiced on the WHAT enlightenment?!! blog. D'uh.

Further, I've not been "sucked in" by anybody.

Oh yes you have, Don. If you believe a word of what Ken Wilber has to say, without going back to the original sources to verify that he's accurately represented them (he consistently hasn't), you have been sucked in by the "Pinocchio of consciousness research," i.e., by someone who has been bullshitting you to your face to get you on his side. And, would you have gotten into Cohen's group without having gone through Wilber first, respecting his endorsement of Andrew (not to mention of SDi, thus promoting your own adopted work)? Either way, you have been sucked in. Royally.

What I "see" are high levels of professionalism and civility on the part of people who have chosen to live within a "group" context. I've seen that in all of the centers [in Cohen's community].

As an "honored guest," yeah, you've seen that. You'd have to be utterly clueless about basic human psychology to think that that was the environment in which the same people existed when "company" such as yourself wasn't around, though, and everyone wasn't on their best behavior.

[I] tend to make hard, objective assessments of what people are actually doing.

No you don't. At least, you've made no competent, objective assessment of Wilber or Cohen. You wouldn't still be dealing with either of them in any context if you had been able to view their teachings and reported behaviors with any sort of objective competence.

Finally, I choose my friends, associates, and colleagues very carefully.

So long as you number Andrew Cohen and Ken Wilber among your friends, associates and colleagues, that is just so much chin music from the First Slinky in the Integral Chamber Orchestra.

The world is full of ankle-biters, of "critics" who can't stand it when others experience great moments....

Oh, please. Is that what he really thinks the critics of Cohen and kw are? They are rather people who have actually been through those shitty environments, and/or have otherwise seen through the fallacious claims to wisdom and enlightenment made by the dismal, absurdly overrated likes of Andy and Kensho. (Note: Beck's response was posted in February of 2005, well before the publication of my own work in that regard, in STG. So he isn't even referring to me ... though my guess is that, by now, he might well group my own work in exactly that same category.) Wilber and Cohen experiencing "great moments"? Yeah, right. "Great delusions" is more like it.

Those who are critical joined with Andrew's movement for some reason. Something about it or him attracted you. You were all adults and, therefore, responsible for your decisions.

As little use as I have for the idea that "no one would ever join an [alleged] cult if they had been told beforehand of the full range of things they'd be required to do in it," unless the members of Cohen's community had read Tarlo's (1993) book before joining, they really didn't know what they were getting themselves into. Reducing that to "adults who are responsible for their decisions" is almost cruel, and is a statement bereft of insight.

Rather than whine, become cynical, drown yourself in "victim-hood," and live on the negative side of life why don't you, in quite simple language -- "move on."

Fuck, if only it were that easy: To just "move on" ... and not even bother with trying to warn other people not to get themselves into the same mess. (Isn't warning others about avoiding sources of needless pain exactly what real compassion—not the idiocy of Cohen and Wilber—about?) Ever been through the cult experience yourself, Don? (Being a leader in kw's community doesn't count. Gotta be a peon to know what it's like.)

Those who need a caring ear, a nonjudgmental environment, and permission to be whatever you want to be, should find a different spiritual leader and culture. You can find them everywhere and they thrive on keeping people totally dependent.

And Cohen doesn't "thrive on keeping people totally dependent"?! Oh my god.... Think, goddamit!

I suggest you do a Blog where you construct what would be a healthy environment for you, based on a strong, decisive teacher who makes demands on people. Turn your complaints into something positive. Then I can respect what you are doing.

Oh, Jesus. I suggest that you avoid even the notion of "strong, decisive" and uniformly delusional spiritual teachers like the fucking plague on humanity that they are. (Even Mother Teresa was basically just a zombie-Catholic fraud with good PR, after all. You think ac and kw are better? They're worse. Much, much worse.) Construct your own healthy environment (even just in theory, as an exercise) without deferring to one or another spiritual (or academic) bullshit artist. That, I would respect.

"Those without sin should cast the first stone."

What, so no one should criticize the work and behavior of Andy 'n' Ken without themselves being "without sin"?! Fuck off, Don. (Plus, you realize that whenever you quote from Jesus you're just foolishly referencing another pre-rational, daftly superstitious cult leader—who spent his time casting out "demons," etc.—right? That is, if J. C. existed at all, which is by no means certain.)

Life is simply too short to exist within a feeding frenzy of anger, resentment, revenge, and hostility. Too often we search for scapegoats to hide our own failures. It is so easy to play the blame game and simply destroy what others are trying to create.

No, Don: Life is too short to spend believing in lies such as the "benefits" of "spiritual abuse," and taking integral fairy tales seriously, when there are real improvements which can be made to the world. The foremost of which, I truly believe, is to get the (uncomplimentary) truth out about the likes of Cohen and Wilber. The world will indeed be a better place the more one can destroy, through simple competent research and a basic understanding of first-year social psychology (Zimbardo, etc.), what the likes of them are "trying to create." 'Cause as soon as you look at their "creations" with any kind of clarity of vision and breadth of knowledge, they consistently fall apart. And apprising other people of that fact is a good thing.

As to Beck's claim that "I sounded harsh because I wanted to get your attention. I just don't like my emails to be filled with materials like yours without getting my permission. I don't have any 'pain,'" I doubt that that's anywhere near the whole truth. A simple "Please remove me from your mailing list" would have sufficed, if that were all there were to it. Beck is bullshitting himself (and everyone else), there, and just doesn't realize it. Don't kid yourself: His high place in the integral world means more to him than anything else; it's his assurance that he's on the "fast track," spiritually, regardless of what techniques of meditation he may or may not actually practice. And anything which threatens that position of respect and "salvation" will be dealt with no more kindly or objectively than the way in which kw dealt with David Bohm's far superior (but threatening, in kw's toddling but insistent misunderstanding of them) ideas.

Plus, if Beck hadn't given a "much more sane and reasonable response" the second time around (or had given no second response at all), he would have been endangering his own high position as one of the "wise elders" in the integral community: The wise ones can't go around behaving hysterically, after all. His final posting was relatively "reasonable," yes, at least in terms of its emotional tone, if not of its shoddy attempts at reasoning. But who knows what the rough draft looked like? Anger can always be edited out, you know. I do that nth-draft editing for tone myself sometimes, too. :)

Does Beck (Ph.D.) make "some good points" through all that, in his second, non-hysterical missive? I'm not sure where. 'Cause to me, it all falls apart on closer inspection. Particularly since, in the (blog) context in which he's making his daft "let's not be critical of others" points, all they serve to do is to let Cohen off the hook for (and allow him to continue) his reported abuse of his students, and encourage new students to submit to that genuinely dangerous environment. (I seriously question Beck's purported knowledge of the dynamics of in-groups and out-groups, too; Robber's Cave Experiment or not.) He's providing a bunch of uninformed, superficial excuses for people (i.e., Andy and kw) whose reported behavior, as documented by some of their closest former followers, has been inexcusable. That is positively shameful.

"Ken and Andrew are making substantial contributions to finding new pathways"? Not to anything that's worth having, they aren't. "Pathways to the Great Imaginary Integral Reindeer Spirit," perhaps. Ho-Ho-Ho.

Overall, if you think that Beck's (second) response is more than a rationalization/whitewash job (unconscious though it may be), you need to put a lot more thought into the subject.

He did indeed sign his second respond as "Don Edward Beck, Ph.D.," though. Hmm. What does that austere appeal to his own authority tell you about the man? Anyone who cares about who "Don Beck" is would already have known that he had a Ph.D., right? So why would he feel the need to mention it?

And me without a silly piece of paper and letters after my name to reassure others that I know what I'm talking about. Oh, well; can't win 'em all.

I was there to match my intellect
On national TV
Against a plumber and an architect
Both with a Ph.D.

—Weird Al Yankovic, "I Lost On Jeopardy"

The Center for Human Emergence will help facilitate the conscious emergence of the human species using a synthesis of profound breakthroughs in human knowledge and capabilities, encompassing natural pattern coherence, mega-integration, unification, expanded whole mind capacity, deep intelligence and consciousness.

—Dr. Don Beck

Well, that explains more about why Beck felt the need to so hysterically defend Andrew Cohen back in the springtime of the year.

Yes, Wilby's involved, too. How could he not be? "Where two or three idiots gather in the name of kosmic konsciousness, he is there." Plus, he's "the world's leading synthesizer of human knowledge," dont'cha know? Dumb fuck can't get high-school-level ideas right, but he's a "leading synthesizer" in the Integral Dance Band. With Cohen banging away on the drums, one assumes. Wonder what pseudo-instrument Don Beck plays. The Slinky, maybe? ('Cause it's all spiral-like.)

The Center for Human Emergence will be a major international force for encouraging and facilitating a conscious or "directed" cultural evolution in the world.

Uh-huh. I'll bet it will. Messianic delusions, enlightened megalomaniacs, leading narcissists, and all.

And on my own tombstone, I dearly hope that someday they will write: He was true but partial.

—Ken Wilber

Ha! "True," my ass! That deluded, regularly dishonest fool wouldn't recognize truth or reality if it bit him on the nose.

Hmm. Looks like Goethean's continuing censoring/vandalism of much-needed critical perspectives from the Ken Wilber page/shrine on Wikipedia ain't the only problem with that site: Wikipedia Watch. Go figure.

Check out what one of the hack editors of Wikipedia had to say about the author of that site, though:

My main concern about Brandt is that he self-publishes. The few things I believe he published in the 80s were in outlets with little, if any, editorial oversight.

As opposed to what? the utterly unreliable crap, filled with errors and deceptions, which Ken Wilber has had put into print by "real" publishers since he began writing? Compared to the Theosophical Publishing House or Shambhala (or Blue Dolphin, for that matter) and their "transrational editors," no one can justifiably rag on self-publishers or small magazines for their lack of "editorial oversight"!

Even if there had been a sincere consensus among all involved for the article in question, Brandt would have needed to check in frequently to make sure that the article wasn't changed by other anonymous, hostile editors. This is a fundamental weakness in the Wikipedia development model.

Yup. In fact, any pre-rational moron (e.g., Goethean) with an agenda can make it damned near impossible for the truth to come out, there.

"Funny," huh? So here's what I just did: Ken Wilber Wikipedia Entry.

Of course, it's possible that Wikipedia's existing dispute-resolution procedures would be sufficient to get Goethean banned from editing there under his current account. (At which point he would presumably just open another and continue with his suppression of uncomplimentary information.) Personally, however, I have better things to do with my time than invite the long-term aggravation which would surely accompany that process. So, he gets away with slanting the information in that encyclopedia in whatever way he wants.

Do you ever wonder how many other entries in that online "joke" of a reference site might not suffer from the same problem, where people who know far better than the self-appointed hack-editing experts simply get tired of arguing, and just go their own way?

Folks --

Ken wanted to share this brief excerpt from his new book -- one that he is just completing: Integral Spirituality. This book will be published by Shambhala this coming summer. Hope you enjoy it.

As we approach the pub date, we'll provide additional excerpts from the book.

=============================================================
Where Is Spirit Located?

Here's a simple thought experiment. Picture the following men or women, and then tell me which you think are probably the most spiritual? [sic; this shouldn't be a question mark, here]

1. A man in an Armani suit
   
2. A woman driving a red Ferrari
   
3. A player pitching baseball in the major leagues
   
4. A professional comedian
   
5. A mathematician
   
6. A person in a tank top lifting weights
   
7. An Olympic swimmer
   
8. A college professor
   
9. A model
   
10. A sexual surrogate

Which do you think is the most spiritual? Which do you think is the least spiritual?

It's funny, isn't it, the things that we think are not spiritual? Why do we picture most of those men as not being very spiritual? Or conversely, why do we have such a hard time seeing them as being spiritual? Aren't we actually just giving our own prejudices about where we think spirit is or is not to be found? Or worse: aren't we really just announcing how old and fragmented and NOT INTEGRAL our ideas about spirit are? Why is telling jokes not spiritual? Why is something beautiful -- a car, a suit -- not spiritual? Why is physical excellence not spiritual? Why is sex not spiritual? Why is....

It's a new world, it's a new spirituality, it's a new time, it's a new man, it's a new woman. All of the above categories are deeply spiritual. Mostly all that list is, is a list of things we are afraid to allow spirituality to touch. Dead from the neck down, with no humor, no sex, no aesthetic sensibility whatsoever, wasting away, spending one's days and nights ignoring the world and lost in prayer... what a strange God, that.

Well, no more. Dead to life, dead to the body, dead to nature, dead to sex, dead to beauty, dead to excellence: that never was a real God, anyway, but merely a desiccated distillation of the things that men and women always had the most difficulty handling, and things from which God became the Great Escape, a distillation and concatenation of every phobic and repressive impulse a human being possessed.

Well, no more. [Again.] It's a new world, it's a new spirituality, it's a new man, it's a new woman.

The Spirit is integral, and so is the human being.

Copyright 2005 Ken Wilber

Uh-huh. Well, I'd like to try a different experiment. ("Thought experiments" were, of course, made famous by ... yes, Einstein. Albert Einstein, that is, not the above "Navin R. Johnson of consciousness research.") Picture the following men or women, and then tell me which you think are probably the most professionally competent and able to face reality in their respective belief systems:

1. A bald man in a cheap suit, drinking tomato juice (which he hates) in NYC to impress his potential publishers when pitching a deeply flawed book attempting (but woefully failing) to marry sense/science and soul/religion
   
2. A woman driving a new jeep she got from her bald boyfriend after his previously stolen car was found
   
3. A guy with less hair than a baseball
   
4. A wanna-be comedian, who actually thinks that miming masturbation and asking his (female?) students for blow jobs is funny
   
5. A guy who can't state the Pythagorean theorem correctly or do simple math (cf. Yellow/Green meme effects in academia), but who is 3% done in attempting to found his own "root" branch of mathematics
   
6. A fifty-something bald person in a tank top lifting weights and posting photos of himself as an "Arnold" on his website
   
7. An man who started shaving his head when he was a swimmer in college, and then kept doing it after his hairline began to recede
   
8. An Integral University professor
   
9. A model who actually is a "10," as opposed to other "7's" and "8's" who get elevated to the status of "drop-dead beautiful" by bald men desperate to be "loved by everybody"
   
10. A former follower of D'uh Guru, whose recent books on sex and spirituality feature forewords by a certain bald integral "scholar"

All of the above categories are deeply clueless. Mostly all [grammar?] that list is, is a list of things we are afraid to allow competence and rational thought to touch. Dead from the neck up, with juvenile humor and horny-college-boy fantasies in bold typeface every ten minutes, publishing every golden turd that drops out of one's divinely inspired, nondual commode, spending one's days and nights masturbating in public ... what a strangely arrested character, deluded view of one's own decade-away-from-senior-citizenship coolness, and daft belief in Imaginary Things, that.

Well, no more. It's a Brand New Day. Sting.

Copyright 2005 Geoffrey Falk

Halbzeit Der Evolution? Was ist das?

The Halftime of Evolution, eh, Kenny? Apparently first published in 1984.

One of the German-edition subtitles translates as "Humans on the Way from Animal to Cosmic Consciousness," another as "An Interdisciplinary Representation of the Development of the Human Spirit," or thereabouts. So I'd assume the 414-page book is more about humans allegedly being evolved to the halfway point between animals and gods, than about the supposed limitations of Darwinian evolution and its anticipated (by the transpersonal/integral community) eventual demise.

Up from Eden, maybe?

I found a passage in your book, "Stripping the Gurus", Chapter 26, that regarded Jung as a Nazi supporter. This is a vicious misunderstanding which is not supported by facts you do not share in your book. To profess this falsehood also indicates no knowledge or understanding of Jung's actual work. Please see the essay by Mark Medweth at: http://www.sfu.ca/~wwwpsyb/issues/1996/winter/medweth.htm Best wishes, [etc.]

Uh-huh. Well, a mere ten seconds of Internet research by me tonight disclosed the following. First, from http://www.history.ac.uk/eseminars/sem9.html:

In an interview on Radio Berlin in 1933, Jung stated:

As Hitler said recently, the Fuhrer [sic] must be able to be alone and must have the courage to go his own way. But if he doesn't know himself, how is he to lead others? That is why the true leader [Fuhrer, again] is always one who has the courage to be himself, and can look not only others in the eye but above all himself.... Every movement culminates organically in a leader, who embodies in his whole being the meaning and purpose of the popular movement.

And in his paper, The State of Psychotherapy Today (1934), Jung wrote:

Freud did not understand the Germanic psyche any more than did his Germanic followers. Has the formidable phenomenon of National Socialism, on which the whole world gazes with astonishment, taught them better? Where was that unparalleled tension and energy while as yet no National Socialism existed? Deep in the Germanic psyche, in a pit that is anything but a garbage-bin of unrealizable infantile wishes and unresolved family resentments.

In the same paper, which clarifies the somewhat cryptic language above, Jung asserted (about Jews): "The 'Aryan' unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish." "The Jew who is something of a nomad has never yet created a cultural form of his own and as far as we can see never will, since all his instincts and talents require a more or less civilized nation to act as host for their development."

From http://commhum.mccneb.edu/PHILOS/Heid-Jung.htm:

I could go on with other quotations from the same essay such as "The 'Aryan' unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish" (Collected Works, v.10, 166), but I think the point has been made. These are racist comments that come dangerously close to Nazi propaganda. Why Jung indulged in these comments is beyond me. I am sure the failed friendship with Freud played a significant role, not to mention the competition between Jung and Freud in terms of whose psychology would survive and win.

From http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/civilization/cc0113.html:

Jung's autobiography is full of insane or occult experiences. He was continually hearing 'voices.' In his autobiography he said his home was "... crammed full of spirits ... they were packed deep right up to the front door and the air was so thick it was scarcely possible to breathe."

Anthony Storr's Feet of Clay has a chapter on Jung as psychotherapy guru-figure. From which:

Jung was a spiritual teacher as well as a physician. In many respects, he conformed to the pattern typical of gurus....

In his later writings [Jung] made overt claims to be a prophet, because he believed that he had been granted special insight. (p. 85)

Everyone who has read Jung's autobiography will recall his vision of God sitting on a throne above the cathedral of Basel and then letting drop an enormous turd which shatters the cathedral roof. (p. 88)

[Jung's] visual hallucinations and distortions closely resemble those described by schizophrenics. (p. 89)

[In 1913, following his break with Freud] Jung began to confuse inner and outer in a way which is characteristic of psychosis. (p. 90)

It figures, doesn't it?

Oh, and very tellingly, Medweth doesn't even hint at the problematic quote from Jung's own hand which started all this.

There is no "vicious misunderstanding" on my (or Askenasy's) part, when the directly quoted words which damn Jung come from his own pen. (Further note: Anyone who is driven to public statements of racism merely [hypothetically] by the competition between himself and his mentor, and/or by the breakdown of their friendship, has real problems.) And, when you focus on countering many lesser suggestions of impropriety, but do not even mention the most damning ones, you really haven't proved/disproved much at all, have you?

If you want to accuse anyone of having "no knowledge or understanding of Jung's actual work," first refute all of the most damning aspects of Jung's apparent anti-Semitism, as documented above. Only when you yourself are properly knowledgeable about the full problematic depth of his writings should you take it upon yourself to correct others in their purported "vicious misunderstandings"; conversely, being unaware of the points documented above precludes one from qualifying as properly knowledgeable in those regards. Oh, and also address Jung's sexist attitude toward women, as evinced above. You know, about them allegedly "aim[ing] at the gaps in the opponent's defenses." Or is that, too, simply a "vicious misunderstanding" of words-in-black-and-white which Carl may or may not have later retracted or modified, but which in either case came from nowhere but his own wonky pen?

Given all that, I will leave the quote in STG exactly as it stands. No shit.

P.S. As any good researcher would do, I hopped on down to the University of Toronto library today (Dec. 9), to photocopy and read Martine Gallard's 1994 paper ("Jung's Attitude During the Second World War in the Light of the Historical and Professional Context") in the Journal of Analytical Psychology (39, 1994, 203-32), frequently cited by Medweth. Just as I had expected, she too makes no mention at all, in her 30 tepid pages, of Jung's most damning comments on "Aryan vs. Jewish psychology." (She does suggest that when Jung was talking about Jewish psychology, he was "really talking about Freud." Well, let's hope so; who knows?)

Jung's Collected Works incidentally, were published in 1970. You wanna be writing "expert" papers on his character and ideas, no way can you not have read them from beginning to end: If Christian de Quincey can read Ken Wilber's ponderous Collected Works, experts on Jung can do the same. No one said it would be fun, but if you want to be knowledgeable about your subject, that is what you do. As the editor of the Cahiers Jungiens de Psychanalyse journal, there is no excuse for Gallard not being thus informed. (Of course, if she actually is informed on these points, and is simply deliberately omitting the most damning information, that's even worse.)

Marie Louise von Franz "knew Jung up to his death and never perceived the slightest trace, conscious or unconscious, of National-Socialist or anti-Semitic support" in him? Yeah, and SRF's Daya Mata never saw Paramahansa Yogananda act inappropriately, either. Never mind that eyewitness reports indicate that the odds are very good that PY was effectively keeping a harem atop the holy Mount Washington center in L.A.

Unlike Gallard and Medweth, however, Von Franz, with her decades of contact with Jung (from 1933 until his death in 1961), must have known of the aforementioned problematic quotes from him. If she never perceived any anti-Semitism in him, then, that's a sad comment on her inability to see. 'Cause it's right there in black-and-white, regardless of what extenuating circumstances may have existed or what mollifying withdrawals C. G. may have made at other times. Whatever the full truth about Jung's attitudes toward Nazis and Jews may be (and I certainly don't claim to have it all sorted out), you cannot read the above documented quotes and still cling to the belief that there was not even "the slightest trace" of anti-Semitism in him! Not unless you want to prove yourself to be unbelievably daft, that is.

Tomorrow on Synchronicity Street: The anti-Semitism of revered mythologist Joseph Campbell. (The [first, synchronicity] linked CSICOP article on coincidences taken as paranormal events certainly also applies, albeit unintentionally, to the rainbows, dreams and other "signs" which are superstitiously taken as being profoundly significant in Tibetan Buddhist searches for tulkus, or ostensibly highly spiritual, reincarnated lamas.)

Joseph Campbell's private expressions of anti-Semitism have been documented by his acquaintances, his students, and even his friends.... [H]is dislike of Judaism [among world religions] is especially uncompromising and, more, appeals to common anti-Semitic stereotypes.

It figures, doesn't it?

Note: In the nine months since I published STG online, I have received all of two—count them, two—valid criticisms of its contents. The more recent was from a knowledgeable follower of Rajneesh, who pointed out that the Raj actually had little or no use for Aurobindo. (I had evidently been repeating someone else's misinformation to the contrary, in one of the very few elements of the book which I hadn't included a reference for, wrongly thinking that it must be utterly uncontroversial information, and not having gone back to the Bhagwan's voluminous writings as primary sources myself. As well it should have been reliable; I mean, how friggin' difficult is it to get something like that right?) I've not kept track of how many wrong and/or insulting attempts at criticism of my position I've received (and blogged about). It's at least in the dozens. Two valid points of fact among all that.

Aside from that, anyone who has read the Gurus and Prisoners chapter in STG, mapping Philip Zimbardo's classic prison study to closed hierarchical communities (e.g., ashrams), should find it easy to understand that any one of us can indeed be suckered into a cult. If not a spiritual cult, then a psychological or a political one. Or a scientific one, in which truly great physicists like David Bohm are ostracized for fifty years simply for questioning the canonized ideas of the field's leaders. Or a skeptical one, in which the "evil other" takes the form of "true believers," and where one must be "skeptical enough" in order to be "saved" from being part of that projected, toxic "other." Think, dammit.

Would a hardened skeptic of all paranormal and enlightenment claims still be at risk of being converted by a Rajneesh or an Adi Da? Perhaps not. But it still wouldn't save him from being subject to exactly the same psychological dynamics in other groups, and from being fooled by the fabricated claims made by the best and the worst of his skeptical heroes, who can be as prone to making things up out of thin air as are the likes of Wilber. The Martin Gardners and James Randis of the world simply have much more of reality on their side, not more ability to face realities which they don't want to see. As long as you leave the door open even a crack for accepting the claims (to paranormal powers or internal enlightenment) made by one or another spiritual personage without experimental proof of their abilities and claimed realizations, you are indeed at risk of being fooled by even the best and the worst of our world's spiritual organizations. The VAST majority of people fall into exactly that category. Certainly all "spiritual seekers" do.

And, if you couple that with the "deathbed conversions" of confirmed skeptics and lifelong atheists, or even with Gardner's comforting childhood-Protestant-based belief in an impersonal God, you come very close indeed to every one of us being susceptible to being fooled by even the best and worst of religious claims and lying/deluded guru-figures.

Falling in love with a guru is very similar to falling in love with a "mere mortal" human being. (Another widely recognized point, that.) You may think you're immune from it and in control, 'cause you don't go head-over-heels for every "sales pitch" you get hit with; but when you meet the right one, zap. The skepticism goes right out the window—at least until it's "too late" and the honeymoon wears off. And then you think you can "walk away unaffected," even if you initially went into the relationship "as if on a dare," just looking for a good time? Yeah, right. How ridiculous. (In the guru-disciple relationship, even if one of the parties "just wants to have fun," the other "divine" half, from the beginning, wants a lifetimes-long commitment.)

"If someone enters [i.e., goes to live in] an ashram as if on a dare, the odds are overwhelming that they'll walk away unaffected"? Pure bullshit. The people in Zimbardo's prison study entered it (effectively) "on a dare"; within three days, nearly half of them were breaking down psychologically; and none were able to leave without the approval of the superintendent/guru. "Walk away unaffected"? Insight-bereft baloney from someone who's made near-zero effort to understand the psychological principles which keep people in closed communities. The explanations are all already there in fucking black and white, in the G&P chapter! And it's all backed by mountains of accepted, ironclad social-psych research, which shows so clearly that you become much more committed to the environment and its pressures when you're in it than you "daringly" thought you'd be, when first looking in from the outside. Only someone with a zilch-level understanding of established principles of social psychology could deny that.

Compare the block-quoted utterly daft notions with how over 95% of people are sure that they wouldn't go along with Milgram's obedience experiments. Yet, "the norm" there is for exactly the same people to defer to authority when they are actually tested! Nearly everyone thinks that they wouldn't behave the way that the subjects in Zimbardo's and Milgram's experiments did; yet, it is the rare person who actually can say "No" to respected authority. If you want to be protected from falling into effective slavery to one or another cultish group, mere skepticism won't do it: There will always be groups, in some field of study in which you have an interest, where questioning of the god-like leaders is not allowed; and where, once you are inside the group, you will have to choose between going along with what you would otherwise know to be wrong, in order to be accepted, versus being ostracized. What insulates a person against that is less skepticism about the claims being made than habitual, fierce independence, and the willingness to stand alone in the world, if need be, rather than cave to someone else's version of "the truth."

But that's what passes for clarity of thought in the Kumquat School of Zen, isn't it? Gonna go out and teach, unsolicited and unwanted; but they themselves can't understand the basics even when it's all explained to them in detail. Honestly, of the people who've sent me garbage like the above, the ones who are practicing Buddhists and who have read enough of Ken Wilber to know his ideas are the worst. In all seriousness, they (cf. Tharpa Thomas Doyle) have burdened me with the most confidently wrong "insights" of any discernable group.

Shit, I just went and responded to that load of tangential drivel, didn't I? It really didn't merit the effort, but I just couldn't help myself.

What addled nonsense like the above-quoted really does, though, is remind me how great it is that there are people (they know who they are) who deeply get what I'm doing in STG, and can indeed do (and have done) comparable work themselves. If they, having demonstrated their own abilities to simultaneously get the big picture and focus on relevant details, were to find serious flaws with my ideas or motivations, I'd start to worry. Until then, yada, yada, yada. Shite like the above, presented as if it came from a reasoned and insightful approach to the near-universal fraudulence/delusions of gurus and their kin, is only good for target practice, nothing more.

And by the way, guy: It's Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship, not his "Spiritual Realization Fellowship." (The phrase only comes up 17 times in STG!) Details can be such a bitch, can't they? And barely relevant tangents are so much fun by comparison, aren't they? Wheee!!!

Learn to think clearly, and to comprehend details in context. Then question my motivations. Damned Kumquat. I seriously question your intelligence, and your ability to reason and to think for yourself. (How the hell do you write code, if your thought processes are so haywire? I checked out your VBA macros, by the way: Nonexistent white space, bizarre variable- and procedure-naming conventions ... and maybe no one's ever told you, but it's a good idea to clean up the excess, irrelevant parameters which all MS Office applications create when you're just capturing keystrokes from them, particularly in code samples which you're proudly [omidog!] displaying to the world. Yikes.)

Think, damn you. Or, if you can't manage that, at least don't waste my time with such half-baked, inane drivel; there goes my whole damned evening, shot to hell. This is precisely why I deliberately didn't check the email account from this website for the past few weeks, in rushing desperately to finish off a 150-hour commercial website: I knew that if I had the misfortunate the receive any such crap, I'd lose far too much time responding to it. I was right, of course.

And you're imagining that Ammachi is a "Divine Mother"? Oy! Some people just never learn! But then, it's always the ones who just can't learn who yet most desperately want to teach others, isn't it? And those who think they're being profound and insightful in focusing on trivia who miss the real, important points.

If you're going to disparage the clarity of Wilber's thinking, you should definitely have a firmer grip on reality yourself than to daftly believe that Ammachi is what she claims to be! "Amma Claus is coming to town"!

To get so hung up on such an inconsequential point regarding kw, and to then so grossly misunderstand the realities of cultism, utterly misrepresenting my ideas, even when both of those points are surrounded and supported in the same book by myriad elements of both theory and experiment, is pathetic. I'd ask you for your motivations in your failed critique of my ideas, above, but your daft support of Amma and continuing gullibility in swallowing spiritual claims shows them clear enough.

Please, guy: Get a fucking clue. The "problems" which you have "found" in my work exist only in your own meditating imagination. Half a decade in SYDA and subsequent Zen practice in CA will do that, I suppose.

P.S. There's no excuse for your shitty programming, either. At least learn the standard coding conventions for VB. The San Diego .NET Developers Group used to have good stuff online for that. (Hint: Any convention which wants you to prefix string variables with "str" rather than "t" was written by people who have far too much time on their hands to do all that needless, extra typing. Use "g" for global scope, "m" for module, nothing for local, and then "t," "i," "s" and "d" for strings, integers, singles and doubles, etc. It's not difficult, and it beats the hell out of giving names like "howMany" [vs. "miHowMany" ... but even there, how many of what? Why not just do "miWidgets"?] to your variables, with no indication as to their type or scope. That's how competent programming is done: It's not just about whether the code runs or not. Seriously, these are things which even the greenest student should know; it ain't me "showing off," it's just basic. And whatever book or help files you learned VBA out of will already have shown you how to do all of that properly; you've just chosen to ignore that good advice, because you wrongly think you've found a "better" way of doing things.) How do I know about that user group? When I was stuck in the Hidden Valley Ashram in Escondido for nine awful months, from which I have not yet recovered, we attended their monthly meetings. I got into SRF simply by believing far too many of Yogananda's fairy-tale claims; couldn't leave the ashram because it would have meant walking away from a promised six-figure telecommuting job to work for minimum wage. There are all kinds of ways of getting trapped in an abusive organization, you know, even if not everyone gets suckered in by every sales pitch, depending on what exactly they're skeptical about. D'uh.

The worst code I've ever seen was actually at Hidden Valley, in the Excel-based software which they used for analyzing the lab results for an alternative agricultural soil-fertilizing method. Half of it was Select Case statements nested up to a dozen levels deep, written by a brahmachari who didn't know any other control structure. The other half was done by a Limey bastard who had programmed mainframes for twenty years, and yet who couldn't write coherent code to save his life (mirroring his own sloppy thought processes and bumbling management, of course). Modularization? Hah! The application was nearly "holographic": With the profusion of Goto statements and the use of "gInt" as both a global variable and a local one (!!), every piece of the program contained every other piece. (The bugs which arose from that misuse of gInt were no fun at all for me to have to track down after that fool left, having given no prior notice at all regarding his planned departure to the Select-Casing, hayseed brahmachari in charge of the project.)

Blog Search Engine