Blog — January, 2006

Rick Moranis, Agoraphobic Cowboy.

I was recently informed of the following observations, from Harry G. Frankfurt's On Bullshit:

[B]ullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. [A]lthough bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner's capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this ... bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are....

Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic are more excessive than his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled—whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others—to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country's affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person's opinions and his apprehension of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.

Does that remind you of anyone?

Of any bald, fifty-something, deluded integral fool, for instance?

Shear is now a Managing Editor for The Journal of Consciousness Studies. I, anyway, had not previously been aware that the JCS was "raiding the faculty" of MIU to staff their editorial department.

And then this, from page 435 of MacDougall's book:

The same day [Sept. 14, 1974] the Chicago Daily News announced [Muktananda's] visit ... James H. Bowman quoted Agehananda Bharati, chairman of the anthropology department at Syracuse University, as saying that Muktananda is "one of the top five or six to come here from India." Most of the others he called "caricatures."

Ah yes, Muktananda. "Top five or six." (Personally, I never thought Bharati had much of a clue anyway.) And the sad thing is, that rating could well have been true. Small comfort, though, to the many early-teenage female followers who claimed to be sexually abused by him.

From Robert T. Carroll's skepdic entry on cryptomnesia ("hidden memory"):

Cryptomnesia may also explain how the apparent plagiarism of such people as Helen Keller or George Harrison of the Beatles might actually be cases of hidden memory. Harrison didn't intend to plagiarize the Chiffon's "He's So Fine" in "My Sweet Lord." Nor did Keller intend to plagiarize Margaret Canby's "The Frost Fairies" when she wrote "The Frost King." Both may simply be cases of not having a conscious memory of their experiences of the works in question.

Nice try. But not quite. From Marc Shapiro's Behind Sad Eyes: The Life of George Harrison:

Delaney [Bramlett] remembered how George approached him one night after a show in a dressing room with a musical question.

"George came over to me and said, 'You write a lot of gospel songs, I'd like to know what inspires you to do that.' And so I gave him my explanation. I told him, 'I get things from the Bible, from what a preacher may say, or just the feelings I felt toward God.' He said, 'Well, can you give me a "for instance"? How would you start?' So I grabbed my guitar and started playing the Chiffons melody from 'He's So Fine' and then sang the words, 'My sweet Lord/Oh, my Lord/Oh, my Lord/I just wanna be with you...' George said okay. Then I said, 'Then you praise the Lord in your own way.' Rita and Bonnie were there and so I told them when we got to this one part to sing, 'Hallelujah.' They did. George said okay"....

George's joy at the success of All Things Must Pass was short-lived. In March 1971, the music-publishing company Bright Tunes, which owned the copyright on the Chiffons song "He's So Fine," filed a plagiarism suit against George Harrison, charging that the former Beatle had borrowed too liberally from that song in the creation of "My Sweet Lord." George steadfastly denied the claim, saying that any inspiration for the song actually came from the Edwin Hawkins Singers hit "Oh Happy Day." But there were many who offered that, figuratively and literally, George had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

"He walked right into it," recalled John Lennon. "He knew what he was doing. He must have known. He's smarter than that. He could have changed a couple of bars in that song and nobody could ever have touched him. But he just let it go and paid the price. Maybe he thought God would just sort of let him off."

Delaney Bramlett, who essentially laid out the blueprint for the song during the Delaney and Bonnie and Friends tour, was equally surprised and somewhat perturbed when he heard "My Sweet Lord" coming out of every radio in the land.

"I called up George and told him that I didn't mean for him to use the melody of 'He's So Fine.' He said, 'Well, it's not exactly,' and it really wasn't. He did put some curves in there but he did get sued."

Delaney became even more upset when he went out and bought the record and discovered that only George was credited with writing the song. "When I saw I wasn't credited, I called George and said, 'George, I didn't see my name on the song.' He promised me that it would be on the next printing of the record. I was never given credit on that song but he did admit to me that the song, to a large extent, was mine, and I never saw any money from it."

Animal personality studies are only the most recent manifestation of the inroads that science is now making into what has long been uncharted terrain: the very inscrutability of our fellow creatures that has, from the dawn of human consciousness, both begotten and bound us to our wildest imaginings about them. All sorts of research has been done in recent years revealing various aspects of animal complexity: African gray parrots that can not only count but can also grasp the concept of zero; self-recognition, empathy and the cultural transference of tool use in both chimps and dolphins; individual face-recognition among sheep; courtship songs in mice; laughter in rats. This is no longer merely the stuff of anthropomorphism or isolated anecdote. As Jaak Panksepp, the neuroscientist who first discovered rat laughter, has pointed out: "Every drug used to treat emotional and psychiatric disorders in humans was first developed and found effective in animals. This kind of research would obviously have no value if animals were incapable of experiencing these emotional states." (more)

"Eros" at work in the K-K-K-Kosmos? Naw, just neo-Darwinian evolution.

Ya don't like my tone, huh? Well, check this out: New York Hack. Female NYC cab driver, used to be a writer and copyeditor at an advertising agency until she got laid off and decided to take life as an "adventure," without worrying about getting her career back on track. (Heh, at least I'm not the only one.) Note, in particular, the skillful use of the phrases "asshole drivers," "Jersey fuck," and "absolute center of the fucking universe."

Granted, I don't spend twelve-hour shifts driving in New York City traffic every workday. But then, she doesn't have to deal with Wilberites and other people so daft as to think that even the most inept/dishonest fool deserves to be treated with respect. (P. T. Barnum would be proud.)

As much as the point seems to be lost on the integral community, being psychologically able to question whether The Pandit is all that he claims to be, but simultaneously unable to competently evaluate critiques of his work, really does mean that you won't be able to intelligently evaluate kw's ideas on your own, either. (If Kensho has taught us one thing, it's that even an objectively high raw intelligence can be completely sabotaged, to the point of widespread, provable professional incompetence, by radical shortcomings in one's psychology.) Such bumbling is never confined to merely one area of life. If it's "mean" to point that out, then fine, I'm a real Blue Meanie. Whatever. Somebody has to make those should-be-obvious points; and it's pathetically obvious, by now, that no one in the integral community is going to do so.

I'd bet dollars to donuts that the same "integral" defenders aren't bothered by that cabbie's trashing of idiot drivers, rather finding it entertaining, even while simultaneously being irked by my use of the same language directed toward Wilber and his ilk. Why do you think that is, guys? Seriously, why do you think you're so delicately bothered by it in one case, but not in the other? (Idiot drivers are unsafe, endangering others? What about kw's moronic endorsements of Adi Da and Cohen?! People who don't know how to drive but who still think they own the road deserve to be mocked? So do people who think they're geniuses but who can't get high-school-level ideas right.)

Who but someone from New Jersey (or with a grudge against New York) would be bothered by bad drivers with NJ license plates being called "Jersey fucks"? Likewise, who but someone with at least one foot still stuck in Integral-Land would be bothered by....

More specifically: Have you ever cussed out another driver for doing something stupid which endangered your well-being or otherwise wasted your time? If so, how do you think that's so different from how I'm treating kw? And if that other "idiot driver" kept driving stupidly, time after time, and just wouldn't learn, at what point would you stop even trying to be nice, and just tell him exactly what you thought of his road skills and level of intelligence? (And, wouldn't you too get "snarkier and snarkier" leading up to that point?)

For all the moral high ground and pretenses to insight that "integral" and "spiritual" people try to comfortably stand on, if they would simply put minimal thought into the subject they would see that they are just as "awful" as I am. They simply pick different spots in life in which to be nasty ... or, maybe they can't "drive" well enough yourself to realize what a menace Wilber is whenever he gets behind the "wheel of karma."

In particular, if you might, even in principle, refer to the worst driver you've ever encountered as being a "total fucking idiot," don't even think of whining about how my use of essentially the same phrase to describe kw (after 135+ pages of thorough debunking) was "the low point" of all that.

P.S. If you say that you've never cussed out another driver, you're either a saint or a liar. And saints don't exist. (If you doubt that, read Monica Furlong's Therese of Lisieux.)

And, if you think you can take the "good" from the integral perspective and leave the rest behind, good luck with that: Every point on which I, for one, have debunked Ken Wilber's claims, was at one time supposedly part of what was worth saving from his ideas. (Or, if you thought that all that was left to do was to "fine tune" kw's four quadrants: Oops, guess again. The core ideas don't hang together at all; yet in the absence of having those problems documented, wouldn't you have thought that they did, and were worth preserving?)

[Bryan] Bridges says he knits to relax. "I've tried meditation and it feels like I'm wasting my time. This is meditative and relaxing but I produce something out of it." (more)

That would be slightly less amusing if it weren't for Mindful Knitting:

Many knitters find that the act of knitting brings about inner serenity and peace of mind.

Mindful Knitting explores this relaxing aspect of the craft by looking at the parallels between knitting and meditation—how the simple, repetitive motions can lead to a heightened sense of connectedness with the world—and explains how to enrich your life by combining the two.

Author Tara Jon Manning shows you how to use knitting as a path toward "mindfulness"—being completely aware of your surroundings without judgment or interpretation—bringing you inner calm and allowing you to develop a renewed sense of self. By focusing on the repeated formation of the knitted stitch and on the natural flow of your breath, you can create a sanctuary from the pressures of everyday life.

Mindful Knitting presents simple meditation exercises along with clear, easy-to-follow instructions for ten original projects that complement and expand upon the meditation themes. Whether you're an advanced or a beginning knitter, or a new or seasoned meditator, the essays and projects in this book will help you to deepen your connection with the practice of knitting—and your experience with mindfulness. It will help you connect with yourself and appreciate the world around you.

Yes, now you too can knit your way to (integral) enlightenment. Really, you can: Trungpa's Naropa University actually teaches a class based on her work! (Tara is headquartered in Boulder, CO, home to many other famous knit-wits. Write for her four-quadrant sweater patterns.)

"Come on, baby, Buddha needs a new pair of mittens...."

From Ken Wilber's One Taste, p. 73-4:

The cautionary tale. Michael [Lerner] is friends with Bill and Hillary, and his "politics of meaning" was particularly espoused by Hillary. The liberal media found out about it [in 1996] and had a field day. Saint Hillary, Michael was "Hillary's guru," and so on. This was very hard on Michael, and it never really let up until ... Jean Houston stepped in to take the flack. A simple visualization technique, used by thousands of therapists daily, was turned into Hillary's "channeling" Eleanor Roosevelt, whereas all she was doing was creative visualization. But anything interior is so utterly, radically, hideously alien to the liberal media that they could hardly discuss the topic without snickering or choking.

Yet, in 1983, Curtis D. MacDougall, emeritus professor of journalism at Northwestern University, had written an entire book detailing the published attitude evinced toward gurus, clairvoyance, ESP, and various less "interior" spiritual pursuits (e.g., astrology, ghosts, witchcraft, and UFOs), by the very same "liberal media." Not to "pull a Wilber" by simply quoting from the back-cover copy without having read the book, but nevertheless, from that (Prometheus Books) copy:

In Superstition and the Press, America's most distinguished journalism professor and veteran newspaperman provides a devastating critique of the treatment by the press of claims of supernatural phenomena. This book documents virtually every story about paranormal events to appear in American newspapers for more than a generation. The author's conclusion is that newspapers, with rare exceptions, treat claims of supernatural experiences and paranormal phenomena without questioning their validity.

Read even just a little bit into the skeptical perspective and you'll find that, to the present day, skeptics are at least as disgusted with the overly credulous nature of media coverage of claimed paranormal phenomena as Wilber is with the same media for not being credulous enough! Skeptics don't try to blame that on the supposed anti-religious biases of American journalists, though.

[Paranormal researchers] just have bad press. Another experiment is not going to change things. It's already one hundred percent certain. Another experiment is not going to make it more certain. What you do have is a massive resistance to these kinds of things. And what you really need is an education system, a PR system, an advertising system, if you will, in the best sense of the word, to do that. Frankly, a lot of the money we're allocating at Integral Institute, large portions of it are for research, but large portions of it are, in the best sense of the word, for PR. Education. We've got to get the word out about this stuff. (Wilber, Speaking of Everything, 2001)

The reality is that any informed and unbiased presentation of the various transpersonal claims daftly accepted by Wilber would be "bad press." And the more informed and fair the presentation was, the worse it would be for him and his ilk.

And what of Jean Houston, selfless flak-taker? Only this:

Jean Houston claims to have completed her doctrinal studies in philosophy of religion at Columbia-Union Theological Seminary and in psychology at Union Graduate School. According to various published biographies, she claims to have served on the faculties of psychology, philosophy, and religion at Columbia University, New York University, the University of California, Hunter and Marymount Colleges, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Oklahoma (New York Daily News, June 25, 1996, p. 2).

Yet researchers have discovered quite a different background. Columbia University claims that Mrs. Houston never completed her doctoral work. [Another "Ph.D. minus thesis," eh?] The University of Oklahoma and Hunter College have no record of her teaching there. In 1973 Houston received a Ph.D. in psychology from Cincinnati Union Institute, "an alternative education program," that did not become accredited until 1985 (Ibid.).

She also made the same embellishment during an interview with Stone Phillips on NBC's Dateline (June 25, 1996), claiming to have "a number of Ph.D.s." When confronted with the documentation refuting this claim, she responded, "I just slipped—I was tired." Yet she also blamed a repeat of this "slip" on her assistant in a later interview with the New York Daily News (June 25, 1996, p. 2).

"Dr." Houston herself is "a fixture" at, among other New Age places on our current plane of reality, the Windstar Foundation—co-founded, of course, by kw's late wife, Treya, prior to their marriage.

It's a small (integral) world, after all.

I only came to my "personal investment" against Wilber's inept, Velikovsky-like work by competently asking the questions which no one in the integral community (including yourself) has thought to ask. (I am being polite, there.) And even I stumbled into it, as I noted explicitly at the end of the Norman Einstein chapter. If you've done your research before bothering me with the above "challenge," you already knew that; if you haven't done that simple research ... well, why the hell not?

In more detail, what happened to sour me on kw and get me properly questioning his wild-ass claims was this:

I was originally planning on writing a follow-up to my first (credulous) book, and was researching the "holographic nature of reality" for that, particularly via kw's The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes. The more I read and re-read that book, however, the more I began to see the inconsistencies and pure fabrications which I've documented in the appendix for STG. (Also, there was that weekend in July of 2003 when I went through much of kw's online postings for his "forthcoming" Kosmos book, including his "updated" nasty and wholly unjustified trashing of Bohm, there.) I was still a "Wilber admirer" when I started that "paper." And I only wrote the "Norman Einstein" chapter after I had completed the appendix.

So, as far as me being unsympathetic to Wilber's notions: That's only the end product, which anyone who was prepared to think clearly and question deeply would come to. All I've done is followed the evidence.

Anyway, the "personal investment" phrase, above, is such a lazy, bullshit thing to throw at me. I only ever "stoop" to the mud-slinging after I've already showed, via "reasoned arguments," that The Bald One, on the specific point(s) in question, doesn't know what he's talking about, and is either professionally incompetent or grossly dishonest in those regards. (Like it or not, those are the two possibilities; it ain't no "skillful means"—even if it were, it would still be grossly dishonest.)

Now, you be honest, guy: Even if there was not a trace of insult or ad hominem in my debunkings of Wilber, you'd still consider them to be the product of a "personal investment," wouldn't you? Granted, all I know of you is from the above block quote (and the cowardice in omitting your last name, and your probable British/Canadian roots in spelling "favour" with a "u"). But I'd still consider that to be a safe bet. Translation: In the integral community, one is allowed to ask superficial questions of the leaders, but not to probe into anything which might call the basic philosophy into question, much less to invoke "skeptical-materialistic science."

And you wanna know something else? No amount of "reasoned arguments" will ever produce any experimental evidence to support kw's claims for the efficacy of meditation or the existence of subtle energies, etc. (And even if the former were a valid claim, and were based on experiments done with competent, non-Alexanderian protocols, it wouldn't do anything at all to ease the very real, proved danger of the same techniques of meditation creating psychoses rather than psychological stage-growth in their practitioners.)

More than half of the problem with the integral perspective, you know, is that you people, in the company of Huston Smith, have no comprehension at all of how to separate true claims from false ones, utilizing the tools of science. You may well reason 'til Ramana Maharishi comes home, creating grand edifices that seem to be unassailable; but it's not worth anything if it doesn't mesh with the cold, hard facts, esp. on points which are easily testable. Even Wilber allows (disingenuously) that "If physicalistic, materialistic, reductionistic forces turn out to give an adequate explanation to the extraordinary diversity of evolutionary unfolding, then fine, that is what we will include in integral theory. And if not, not." It's just that he lacks both the intellectual honesty and the professional competence (even in his own field of near-Ph.D. training) to separate the real stuff from the laughable, Behe-ian pseudoscience. So, like all "true believers," he appeals to science when he thinks that it supports his viewpoint, and completely ignores or grossly/willfully misinterprets it when he needs to twist it to fit his half-baked "theories."

Those are well-established behaviors among believers; read even just a little bit of James Randi's weekly postings or books, and you'll see that it's something that the skeptical community encounters (and demolishes) every day of the week. It's equally completely standard for the believers to pretend that anyone taking a skeptical view of their claims doesn't even want the metaphysical claims to be true. Well, I for one would still be delighted if auras, astral travel and subtle energies were to turn out to be real. (Note, though, that all three of those phenomena could be real without that in any way implying that Wilber's theories are valid.) And all that anyone needs to do to convince me that they are more than just the product of overactive imaginations is to provide one properly vetted, independently repeated experiment demonstrating that at least one person who claims those perceptions can actually display them under controlled conditions at beyond a chance-guessing level.

[T]he burden of proof is always on the advocate of an idea or an asserter of fact.

—Joe Nickell with John Fischer, Mysterious Realms, p. 58.

That principle is absolutely basic, particularly when wild-and-wooly claims are being made. So, show me those valid, reasoned arguments and the competently vetted experimental data with regard to Wilber's ideas and claims.

What? You don't have any valid, reasoned arguments or proper experimental data to counter any of the arguments I've previously made against kw, or to convince me that the kosmos is ontologically real in four (or more) quadrants, including the mapped-by-kw-to-subtle-bodies transpersonal components of psychological growth? Oh, pity. And there I was, all set to drop my "personal investment" in proving that Wilber is a "total, fucking, bald, integral idiot." Well, maybe next time.

Anyway, whether or not I have a "personal investment" in proving Wilber wrong might be an interesting question for you to ponder if you have nothing better to do with your time (and simultaneously waste mine). It makes no difference, however, to what I've written about Wilber, just as James Randi's skeptical attitudes make no difference to the chances of any claimed psychic (including Sylvia Browne) winning his One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. (And why has Wilber himself not applied for that challenge, given his publicly claimed ability to sense subtle energies?)

Truth will withstand the toughest questioning and still emerge shining, right? Well, then try actually applying that principle, Integral-ites, rather than wasting time worrying about "personal investments" or the like. Focusing on wildly hypothetical questions where the answer doesn't even matter is no substitute for intelligently evaluating your own beliefs—though it may well be an effective way of distracting yourself from doing the long-overdue latter, and laughably pretending to be insightful in the process. I'm gonna go out on a limb here, guy, and guess that this isn't the first time you've played exactly that game with yourself.

Ah, and more reasons to not take Wilber's ideas seriously: The next segment (1B) of Meyerhoff's Bald Ambition is now online. Sure to get Kenny's panties in a bunch, as they say. The next few years and decade are going to very difficult for him, I think.

Oh well, that's "karma," isn't it?

P.S. I received a second piece of email through this website, recently. Something again about the nasty tone of STG, which I've already addressed twice before on this blog, so I (as per my stated policy) didn't bother reading beyond the first line. Please, do minimal research before you waste my time with (even one line of) stuff like that. By contrast, just a few weeks ago I received the following review of STG, via a third party:

It is a necessary and well written book and certainly well researched.

Also, and I particularly enjoy this, he writes like the few eminent scientists who bother to write: with a casual kiss-my-ass authority.

That's coming from a university prof who was interested enough in Werner Erhard's ideas back in the '70s to check out a talk he gave, but not so gullible as to get suckered into them. In short, he understands how religion and even "integral spirituality" are near-complete crocks. Correspondingly, like a number of other Ph.D.'s who would like for all of the fairy tales in spirituality to be true, but who understand that the evidence offers no support for that belief, far from being offended by the tone of STG, he rather found it worthy of unsolicited complimenting. Go figure, huh? I have said it before: If you find yourself bothered by the writing style in STG, never mind feeling obliged to write and daftly tell me that, that says much more about you than it does about me.

What further amazes me is when people try to dis my work/character with regard to integral idiots and other cults by saying I'm "obsessed" with the subject. Jesus H., if only you knew how much I'd rather be doing other things than dealing with Wilber and his Wilberites, etc. But even stupid/lazy questions require answers; otherwise I'm "in the wrong," right? 'Cause why else wouldn't I be responding? Catch-22. Yet, this is an entire afternoon I just completely wasted, learning nothing new myself from the "dialogue," simply rehashing things I already knew, and which anyone who wanted to do even minimal research could have figured out for himself. Which, by the way, is almost certainly exactly why David Bohm never responded to Wilber's own half-wit, bumbling "critique" of his Nobel-caliber ideas in physics ... which kw (stupidly, stupidly) takes as confirming his own brain-dead notions, and "refuting" Bohm's real-genius ideas! (I look forward to receiving "reasoned arguments" in favor of Wilber's work in that regard, too. There aren't any? Oh....)

Incidentally, I had far, far more of a "personal investment" in Yogananda being genuine than I could ever have in proving Wilber's ideas wrong; if I could face the truth for the former, even largely figuring it out on my own, I can certainly do the same for the latter. D'uh. If you've read STG—i.e., if you've done the minimal amount of research and put the slightest amount of thought into the subject before throwing out half-baked, lazy questions—you already knew that. If you haven't done that minimal amount of work, read the link to Steven Dutch's relevant ideas on the worthlessness of uninformed opinions (and the dumb questions/objections that can arise from them). Either way, don't project your (probable) inability to face reality onto me, guy.

If evidence and reasoning mean anything to you, you won't still be holding out anything more than the faintest glimmer of hope that Wilber's philosophy will turn out to be more right than wrong. Even if my work has no effect on you in that regard, Meyerhoff's debunking (incl. via Andrew Smith) of kw's twenty tenets should be enough. Never mind that Wilber's philosophy isn't consistent with the "external" data (of "skeptical-materialistic science," etc.), it's not even internally consistent! And that, in the integral world, qualifies him as being "brilliant"?! Shite, then how badly would anyone in that community have to fuck up to be seen as a damned fool?

Julia Sweeney's fine take on the James Frey A Million Little Pieces memoir controversy:

[I]t is important if what he wrote was true or not. It does make a difference. Oprah is just trying to protect her choice by saying that it doesn't matter if it's true or not. Because if it were a book labeled "fiction" she wouldn't have bought it. And she herself said that what was so amazing to her was that this person who wrote this book was still alive. So it was important whether it was true.

Also, a nice remark by Sweeney about why she returned one of Huston Smith's (close friend of kw) books for a refund: "although he knows so much about religion he knows nothing about what science is or how it works."

She could, of course, have said precisely the same thing about 99% of the individuals mucking about in transpersonal or integral psychology, and been just as wholly correct. Even the first clue of how science is done, and what simple experiments have been done to sort fact from fiction in parapsychological claims, can keep us from fooling ourselves or just believing what we want to believe. Transpersonal and integral "experts," from Dr. Smith on down, not only lack that understanding, but would run at top speed away from it even were it to be set before them and spoon-fed to them.

The first female crash test dummy? Ha! Everyone knows that Ellen Reid was the first female Crash Test Dummy.

Can you believe this? Falcon Beach. Set on Lake Winnipeg, for Pete's sake. It's like something SCTV might have done: Transplant a southern California series (e.g., The O.C.) to the frozen North.

The 0° C.

"Dude! There's some killer snowdrifts out on the lake! Grab your ski-doo!!"

CUT TO: Joe Flaherty and John Candy, wearing ski goggles and toques, rev their ski-doo engines, using the snowbanks as ramps for their less-than-xtreme stunts. Catherine O'Hara and Andrea Martin wait on the "shore," shivering but cheering their guys on; trying to flash their chests and look sexy under four layers of heavy winter clothing, while Beach Boys music plays.

I grew up south of Lake Winnipeg (Manitoba). Only for approximately three months of the year (June – August) does it or the surrounding countryside in any way resemble California—if California had mosquitos as big as your fist. The rest of the year, the provincial capital more than earns its nickname of "Winterpeg." ("Winnipeg is virtually assured of having a White Christmas as there is only one December 25 on record in the last century where there was no snow on the ground." Their international airport building, by the way, is roughly the size of a Wal-Mart or Costco store.)

In the words of comedian Emo Philips, at one of the shows he gave in Winnipeg, years ago:

Last time I came here it was so cold....

(How cold was it?)

It was so cold I considered contracting gonorrhea just for the burning sensation.

Ach, here we go again: In kw's response to John Heron's "not even wrong" (as Wolfgang Pauli would say, quite rightly) critique of his theories, he again pretended: "[O]ne study showed that, among individuals who meditated for several years, an astonishing 38% reached those higher stages." Well, if you can call eleven years merely "several," then yes, 38% of the subjects in a study with woefully ineptly designed protocols advanced to Loevinger's highest stages in "several" years.

The astonishing thing there is that Wilber, in point #16 of that same response, actually references Michael Murphy's The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation. So he knows damned well—assuming that he's actually read that book, as opposed to having merely cited it without having read it (don't laugh, now)—how meditation, far from being the "doorway to God," can utterly screw up people's lives. (KW is referencing that work, there, only for the "reams of actual evidence" it references in favor of meditation. At least Murphy, though no less credulous, is honest enough to present both sides, explicitly. Not so for the Great Wilber.)

From the final, "Negative Experiences" section in Chapter 4 of that book:

Long-term meditators reported the following percentages of adverse effects: antisocial behavior, 13.5%; anxiety, 9.0%; confusion, 7.2%; depression, 8.1%; emotional stability, 4.5%; frustration, 9.0%; physical and mental tension, 8.1%; procrastination, 7.2%; restlessness, 9.0%; suspiciousness, 6.3%; tolerance of others, 4.5%; and withdrawal, 7.2%....

Ellis (1984) stated that meditation's greatest danger was its common connection with spirituality and antiscience. He said that it might encourage some individuals to become even more obsessive-compulsive than they had been and to dwell in a ruminative manner on trivia or nonessentials. He also noted that some of his clients had gone into "dissociative semi-trance states and upset themselves considerably by meditating"....

Hassett (1978) reported that meditation can be harmful. Carrington (1977) observed that extensive meditation may induce symptoms that range in severity from insomnia to psychotic manifestations with hallucinatory behavior. Lazarus (1976) reported that psychiatric problems such as severe depression and schizophrenic breakdown may be precipitated by TM.... Glueck and Stroebel (1975) reported that two experimental subjects made independent suicide attempts in the first two days after beginning the TM program.

That, not claimed-but-utterly-unproven psychological stage-growth even over periods of decades, is what any group (integral or otherwise) that encourages you to meditate, for whatever reason, is really offering you. (Note: Personally, I have had nothing but good results from meditation. Other people have not been so lucky.)

Of course, even Murphy, with his deep transpersonal and integral biases, can't resist trying to put a positive spin on all that:

Though the rewards of contemplative practice can be great, they do not come easily.

So, if meditation is producing clinically psychotic behaviors in you, apparently you just have to "work harder." (That is, of course, exactly the remedy which your teacher and peers will suggest. And to not go along with that bad advice is effectively to admit that you're not fit or ready for the "fast track to enlightenment.")

Nice analysis of the Libertarian Party political platform by Steven Dutch.

Hey, aren't skeptical magicians Penn and Teller proudly libertarian? (And proud teetotalers, as well: Penn has "never once lost himself in drugs or alcohol." Wow, "how cool is that?!")

In fairness to P & T, though, I've since been informed that the "Cato Handbook on Policy" is a much better source for intelligent libertarian perspectives than is the Libertarian Party itself. (The Cato Institute "seeks to broaden the parameters of public policy debate to allow consideration of the traditional American principles of limited government, individual liberty, free markets and peace." Teller is actually a Mencken Research Fellow at that Institute.) Being Canadian—or "un-American," as they say—with little interest in politics even in my own country, I will excuse myself for having missed that.

Dutch also notes:

A good general cut-through-the-crap question I use whenever I deal with someone I suspect of playing games rather than seeking truth is "what would it take to convince you that your ideas are false?" The responses I get range from a deer-in-the-headlights look of utter bewilderment to spluttering rage that I would even make such a demand, but very rarely do I get any evidence of serious thought.

You know where I'm heading with that, right?

To everyone in the integral community, from Ken "King of the Quadrants" Wilber on down:

What would it take to convince you that your ideas are false?

That spluttering sound you hear....

P.S. Dutch has also posted excellent pieces deconstructing the ignorant, often-incoherent post-modern babble of Latour and Derrida, and giving a refreshingly clear-eyed examination of the relation of empirical evidence to religious belief. Nice rant on the worthlessness of uninformed opinions, too. Not to mention why half a wing is better than none.

New page and menu item: Critiques of Ken Wilber.

Laughable attempted critique of Jim Andrews' Twenty Boomeritis Blunders essay, reminding everyone who cares to see why the integral community has failed so miserably to hold Ken Wilber accountable for his many indefensible claims.

Which also brings up this point:

If you find my insults directed toward Wilber to be tiresome, fine. Whatever. But remember: He has tried to mislead you just as much as he's tried to mislead me. And someday you, too, may untangle yourself enough from the nest of fairy tales which constitute transpersonal and integral psychology (even without kw's contributions) to be really pissed about being deceived by people who are viewed as truth-expounding geniuses, but who are in fact utterly professionally inept and dishonest. That is, you too may come to see them as being little more than "total, fucking, bald, integral idiots." (There's 135+ typeset pages of exposed deceptions, even just from my own writings, underlying that statement. If you've learned one thing from the integral world, it's that everything has a context, right? So don't "play dumb" and pretend that that history doesn't exist, or daftly imply that it should "start from zero" each time.)

So, if my kw-related blog entries are becoming "snarkier and snarkier," I'm okay with that. What is this thing, anyway, with people availing themselves of my blogged or e-published work, for free, and then whining about how my tone or attitude don't make them happy?! Integral-ites: If you don't like how I do it, do the damned work yourselves! Why should I have so much of the "fun"? You can do basic research, right? Then do it, for Khrist's sake. Figure it out for yourselves! What's stopping you? Note, however, that if you think you can competently critique integral ideas from any source while continuing to believe seven impossible things before breakfast every day, you do not have history on your side to predict success in that.

It is no coincidence that by far the most damning critiques of Wilber's ideas, and in particular the only critiques which take him to task for his utterly naïve parapsychological beliefs, have come from outside of the integral community, you know. Everyone still inside the community, after all, is still trying desperately to salvage as much as they can of the integral perspective—and thus producing critiques which, even when valid in their own domain, have roughly the same degree of value elsewhere as would arguing passionately and rigorously over whether Hansel and Gretel left a trail of whole-wheat or of white breadcrumbs/heaps/holons on their way to the witch's integral gingerbread house.

Um, and the critique of kw from 1996 is by David Lane, not "Tim Lane." Thought you might like to know.

P.S. If you really were to finally extricate yourselves from believing in integral fairy tales, you'd be surprised at the delicious center which exists inside the "bitter, off-putting insults." :(

Granted, it took me five years to untangle myself from Yogananda's equal deceits and his outright fraudulence. But then, I didn't have it all handed to me on a silver PDF/blog platter, either. If I had, it wouldn't have taken even five weeks, much less would I have continued to defend the purported value of "yogic work" in general.

Recognizing the problems with Wilber's bumbling work and nasty character is good, but it's only the first step. And until you're ready to go beyond that, there could be a hundred times as much debunking of Wilber's ideas published, or of any other integral perspective, and it could all be done as sweetly and validly as you please, without a single insult. It would make no difference: you'd still "believe," all the moreso for having not a shred of real evidence to support the ontological reality of anything transpersonal in that "integral perspective." (In trying to determine whether parapsychological phenomena exist or not, far more relevant than the fact that many skeptics would have difficulty accepting their existence is the reality that [i] people [e.g., Susan Blackmore, "Tim Lane"] who start off as "believers" but who keep questioning and demanding competently performed experiments for the testing of psi powers, even doing their own experiments, invariably end up as "radical agnostics" about the existence of those powers, and [ii] the high-paying challenges which have been offered by skeptics to claimed possessors of paranormal talents are invariably set up, with the input and agreement of the subjects being tested, so that their position on the subject and/or their reluctance to "believe" doesn't matter.)

And if you think that the greater belief in fairy tales even in the face of convincing evidence to the contrary is an exaggeration, all you have to do is consider how many people think that homeopathy or the like work, based merely on their own anecdotal experiences (which have no more value than does Wilber's imaginative endorsement of the Q-Link pendant), in spite of all the properly controlled studies demonstrating exactly the contrary.

And, as another bottom line: Given the many documented negative side-effects of meditation on people, it is unconscionable that Wilber or anyone else would blithely encourage people to meditate "for their spiritual growth." That applies to any perspectives, including integral ones, which encourage people to meditate, for whatever reason, without fully warning them of the serious/psychotic risks to their own health.

As to competently performed studies on meditation which would support Wilber's ideas on stage-growth: If they existed, he would be shouting their authors' names from the integral rooftops. As it stands, he can't even competently quote the protocol from the few cited studies which he wrongly thinks have proved that meditation advances people through stages of psychological growth. So good luck with finding better published studies which, realistically, don't exist, much as they logically "could" exist. Not that their absence will stop you from believing, regardless; but "good luck with that." When you follow the advice of conscience-bereft, not-bright-at-all, bald integral fools—or when you can't think any more clearly than them, yourself—you will certainly need all the luck you can get.

Given the egregious, utterly amateur fuck-ups involved in its construction, Wilber's integral view of reality has demonstrated no more "brilliance" on the part of its creator than did Velikovsky's electromagnetic theory of gravity or his conjectures about how biblical miracles (e.g., manna falling from the sky) might have occurred by natural laws. When I say that Wilber is an idiot, I mean for that to be taken in exactly the same sense in which competent members of the scientific community might refer to Velikovsky as an idiot, quack or incompetent, completely out of his depth, but convinced that he himself is a "genius" and is making ground-breaking contributions to the field.

The idea that Wilber is the "Velikovsky of consciousness research" may be funny, but it's no joke. As Robert Carroll noted about Velikovsky, though: "That is not to say that his work is not an impressive exercise and demonstration of ingenuity and erudition [i.e., in imaginative "theorizing" and the taking of mere coincidences as if they indicated deep, underlying connections]. It is very impressive [though nonetheless hopelessly wrong], but it isn't science. It isn't even history." (Re history: Compare kw's [accurate!] use/quoting of Lorenz's hopelessly outdated and misled ideas on human vs. animal aggression, even to the present day. That, too, is "not even history.") Less charitably, Velikovsky's former associate Leroy Ellenberger observed: "The less one knows about science, the more plausible Velikovsky's scenario appears." And Michael Friedlander: "I would not trust any alleged citation by Velikovsky without checking the original printed sources." Or this: "Velikovsky interprets, adds, and deletes liberally while insisting he is adhering literally to the evidence.... Given such an array of data and freedom to interpret, the legends can be made to fit any theory." Or this: "[W]hen a book contains obvious incompetencies that can be spotted just at random, you don't need to read the whole thing to conclude it's junk." Or this: "[T]he New York literary world considered Velikovsky a genius on par with 'Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Freud.'" Or, finally, this: "[T]here can be no denying the scientific indifference and incompetence of Velikovsky." Do those critiques remind you of anyone else's work?

If it looks like an integral quack, and theorizes like an integral quack ... it's Duck à la Wilber.

But Velikovsky [Wilber] makes it all look so consistent. Surely he couldn't put all those legends together so neatly unless his theory was true? Variations on this theme come up with just about every type of pseudoscience. The startling truth is that theories that hang together pretty well logically and are reasonably consistent with most of the evidence are a dime a dozen in science. It's easy—anyone can construct one. The key to the problem lies in the qualifiers "pretty well," "reasonably consistent," and "most of the evidence." The difference between a mediocre theory and a good one is that the good theory is as nearly as possible entirely consistent with all the evidence. You can make any theory look good if you are free to disregard or rearrange key bits of evidence. (Steven Dutch)

Yup. Wilber's traded on that fact for his entire career. And, if you ask me, the non-Wilberian "integral" alternatives out there are no better, having just as much of a "selective fantasy" component to them, and no more ability or willingness on the part of their authors to distinguish fact from probable fiction by established, simple (scientific) methods designed to prevent people from fooling themselves. If by "the integral perspective is here to stay" one means simply that future philosophies will try to incorporate the moments of truth from each of their predecessors and component perspectives, I'm all for that. It's the "fantasy" aspects of all that, though, that will either somebody be proved to exist in independently replicated, competent testing (which neither kw nor Skip Alexander would, it seems, recognize if it bit them on the nose), or die a well-deserved death, and thus certainly not be "here to stay" in any good or rational way.

Even outside of that consideration, the huge differences between, say, Wilber's hierarchical kosmos versus the peer-to-peer alternative(s) are the product of no mere "fine tuning" of ye olde Four Kwadrants. How do you plan on deciding which one is right(er)? or, at least, discerning which one is less wrong? When you have alternative integral approaches being put together by people who are as convinced that homeopathy works as kw is certain that the Q-Link pendant works, and other people making important contributions to those alternatives only after having demonstrated their own lack of understanding of Wilber's ideas in attempted critiques of his work, you're just setting yourself up for another series of disappointments.

When you have to screw up or grossly oversimplify basic, high-school-level ideas, from neo-Darwinian evolution to Spiral Dynamics® to Piaget, in order to make your ideas "fit," as kw does, that is not "brilliant," except perhaps brilliantly stupid. (If you disagree, and continue to regard Wilber as a "brilliant" individual in spite of his documented bumblings, do the same for Velikovsky. And then be prepared to explain how someone can be simultaneously brilliant and incompetent in the same subject. Velikovsky's fertile imagination and few, coincidental "hits" in predicting that the planet Venus would be hot, etc., in no way made him a brilliant individual—though his daft followers would certainly disagree. The same applies to Wilber and his imaginative theories, which have predicted even less.)

As noted above, anyone should be able to create "impressive syntheses" of existing knowledge if they're allowed to twist (or selectively ignore), in whatever way they want, the facts they're purporting to include! That is one reason, among many, why it is so important to get your basic facts straight, through competent experimentation or at least the ability to recognize the lack of validity in the experiments done by others (e.g., Skip Alexander), before you start theorizing ("integrally" or otherwise), not after.

Ken Wilber, one of the most important contemporary integral thinkers, begins by acknowledging and validating mystical experience, rather than denying its reality. As these experiences have occurred to humans in all cultures in all eras, they are accepted as valuable and not pathological. (Wikipedia, "Integral theory (philosophy)" entry)

Yes, that's exactly my point. That's where he begins, and that is where he will end, regardless of the evidence or the obvious influence of group bias in the "meditative data" coming from those past and current cultures. And peer-to-peer "participative spirituality" is going to be any more vetted or valid? Not a chance. Much as their theorists may object to hierarchies, in spiritual communities and otherwise, they have no more objection to parapsychological fairy tales, and no more willingness to competently test claims (e.g., auras, astral travel) which are easily testable, to determine whether their phenomena are real or not, than does The Great Wilber himself. (John Heron is one of the "P2P pioneers." His A Way Out for Wilberians is, in his own words, "not a defense against the call to spiritual self-transfiguration. I am committed to and engaged with that call." And so he suggests a process whereby "individuals agree on a methodology of inquiry, then compare their experiences, adapting their inquiry to their findings, etc." Well, that's a small step up from Wilber's inadequate ideas on the topic of "scientific mysticism," but still would do absolutely nothing to show that what the subjects were experiencing was real.)

Q-Links and hierarchy, or homeopathy and peer-to-peer; Hansel and Gretel, or Peter and the Wolf. Choose whichever bedtime story you prefer. Just don't be surprised when you wake up screaming from the nightmares.

"Just the place for a Snark!" the Bellman cried,
As he landed his crew with care;
Supporting each man on the top of the tide
By a finger entwined in his hair.

"Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
That alone should encourage the [integral] crew.
Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is [wilber-esquely] true."

Anyway, I'll stop insulting the dumbass Wilber when he stops fucking up on ideas which even a competent high-school student could be trusted to get right. And after he's explicitly, publicly repudiated his clueless endorsements of Alexander's work, and withdrawn his outright dishonest claims about the existence of parapsychological phenomena being "100% certain." And after he's apologized profusely for ever (mis)leading anyone to throw his/her time and life away on the like of Adi Da and Andrew Cohen. And after he's offered to make up (financially) for the pain, suffering, and lost time and wages which anyone who's ever taken his dangerously stupid ideas regarding gurus seriously enough to act on them has had to face. (There's more, but that's enough for now.)

If you think about it, that would actually be quite fair.

Astronomy Picture of the Day. "Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer."

Hey, there's a whole website concerning Ken Wilber's screwed-up view of Adi Da: www.adidawilber.com.

Feel free to ignore the "spiritual zombie" drivel about wronged "cult leaders" on the home page, there: As far as "fundamentalists" allegedly being behind the "anti-cult" movement, that's just pure paranoia, not even close to reality. Yes, the Wellspring Retreat is run by evangelical Christians, the Apologetics Resource Center's mission (under a president who held a position at the American Family Foundation, now ICSA) is to "reach the minds and hearts of people with the message and truth claims of the gospel of Jesus Christ," and Tal Brooke at the Spiritual Counterfeits Project is a former Sai Baba follower, now a born-again Christian, etc. And don't even get me started on Walter Martin, even though skeptic Robert Carroll seems to think he's a good source of (Christian) information on (non-Christian) cults. If you really think that the objections to groups like Adi Da's spring merely from any sort of fundamentalism, though, you're way out to lunch. All you need is a freshman knowledge of psychology (re: Zimbardo's prison study, Milgram's obedience studies, and the narcissism present in the bulk of our "spiritual leaders," as documented by Len Oakes in his Prophetic Charisma) to accurately predict that there's much more to it than that.

And note how, to real fundamentalists, many of the Christians above are seen as being guilty of having "New Age" ties! That is, according to them, the AFF and (pre-Scientology-influenced) Cult Awareness Network are "part of the problem," for not being explicitly Christian organizations! (Odd misstatement of fact, there, asserting that Leo Ryan "was killed by followers of People's Temple cult leader Jim Jones, as he arrived in Jonestown, Guyana to investigate alleged human rights abuses there." Congressman Ryan was shot in cold blood, not "as he arrived," but rather after his tour of Jonestown, as he and his group were preparing to board their plane to leave.)

In any case, "big, overgrown, diluted, traditional cult" members helping other "little, nontraditional cult" members to see things "more clearly" is certainly a bit of the old "pot, kettle, black" syndrome. Conversely, though, there is nary a peep coming out of the cult-studies field about the dangers of membership in, say, the Roman Catholic Church, even aside from their problems with clergy sexual abuse. A large part of the reason for that surely has to do with the fact that a significant proportion of the people working in that field have extricated themselves from little, destructive cults, just to go back and embrace a bigger and older, "safe" cult with a history of witch-hunts and Inquisitions, etc. But, of course, they can't admit to themselves that what got them into the little cult in the first place is also what now makes them cling to the "safe, traditional religion" (i.e., big cult). So they instead have to contort their theorizings and insist that no one would ever join a destructive cult or adopt its odd beliefs if they hadn't been tricked into it ... even while they themselves wholly believe equally wacky but "socially acceptable" fairy tales (open the Bible—or Bhagavad Gita, or Koran—to nearly any page to see a good number of examples of that).

Surprisingly, the aforementioned kw-da website is done by loyally daft followers of Da Fijimeister, who are worried that kw's "waffling like the International House of Pancakes" with regard to their authentic (pfft!) "Spiritual Master" is creating "confusion" about the worth of D'uh Guru, etc.

Oddly, that unintentional confusion may well be one of the more valuable aspects of kw's life's work. No joke.

If you're feeling just too relaxed, and want to pick up on some of that mile-a-minute, "honk if you're misanthropic" New York City tension: The Times Square Cam.

Just when you thought it was safe to reach for that aluminum can of Coke....

Of course, as always, there are alternative positions there, too. But given the transparently simplistic nature of the "aluminum is all around us" objections, versus McDougall's thoroughly footnoted research (with journal page numbers even, bless him), I think you go with the "current consensus" there at your own peril. (Plus, more than half of the twelve footnotes given by McDougall in support of his position are from papers published only after the 1997 "expert opinions" given in Scientific American.)

And note that the study (footnote 36) concerning the use of desferrioxamine in patients with Alzheimer's disease was published in Lancet, no less. You can't get much more "respectable" than that.

Both of Jim Andrews' essays (Ken Wilber on Meditation and Twenty Boomeritis Blunders) are now included as appendices on the Stripping the Gurus website.

The debunking of Wilber which I have done (frequently aided by Andrews) on this blog since the April, 2005 release of STG has also been collected there, as Appendix II: The Blind Eye of Spirit.

PDFs of each of those are freely available for download.

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