Blog — January, 2007

As usual, kw leaves one guessing as to who the author of the "invalid criticism" might be. One does, however, find the following in Meyerhoff's Bald Ambition:

Wilber's ignorance of the value-laden character of all developmental models is demonstrated in his most famous paper, "The Pre/trans Fallacy." In that article, Wilber distinguishes the pre-rational spirituality of children, primitives and those immersed in mythic religion from the trans-rational spirituality of mystical adepts. Wilber argues that pre-rational and trans-rational states have been confused, resulting in either a reduction of the trans-rational to the pre-rational, as in the "oceanic feeling" of Freudian psychoanalysis, or an elevation of the pre-rational to trans-rational status, as in aspects of Jungian psychology. In the introductory section of that article Wilber writes:

since the world of time is the world of flux, all things in this world are in constant change: change implies some sort of difference from state to state, that is, some sort of development; thus all things in this world can only be conceived as ones that have developed. The development may be forward, backward, or stationary, but it is never entirely absent. In short, all phenomena develop, and thus true phenomenology is always evolutionary, dynamic, or developmental.

These sentences contain a subtle and problematic shift. Change, a fact of existence, is equated with development, even though the word development has the connotation of directed or patterned change through time. Change and development cannot be equated because we can certainly imagine random change, such as the change in numbers that a random number generator creates, which show no development. We are told that development can be stationary; and while there can be stationary development, can there be stationary change? It sounds like a contradiction in terms. This difference between change and development is due to the value-laden character of the word development which suggests a change over time, the character of which is deemed to advance, regress or stay the same. All things change as Wilber says, but to assess development we need some criterion of advance and regress in order to make a value-judgment.

If kw was referring to Meyerhoff's critique of the PTF, then, he found a barely relevant flaw in it, and then very dishonestly used that to discount the entire argument as being an "invalid criticism." But, the salient differences noted by Meyerhoff between change vs. development obviously apply at least as well to stages as to states.

You would think Wilber would have the "altitude" to be able to see that, wouldn't ya?

And so it goes, for the "integral revolution."

Prankster hierarchy? There wasn't supposed to be any Prankster hierarchy. Even Kesey was supposed to be the non-navigator and non-teacher. Certainly everybody else was an equal in the brotherhood, for there was no competition, there were no games. They had left all that behind in the straight world ... but ... call it a game or what you will. Right now, among the women, Mountain Girl was first, closest to Kesey, and Faye was second, or was it really vice versa, and Black Maria was maybe third, but actually so remote it didn't matter. Among the men, there was Babbs, always the favorite ... and no games ... but sometimes it seemed like the old personality game ... looks, and all the old aggressive, outgoing charm, even athletic ability—it won out here, like everywhere else....

—Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

And, of course, "you're either on the bus or off of it," i.e., either psychedelically "saved" ... or not. Hip or square. Cool, or damned.

So, what are you willing to do, to be "on the bus"?

It's always, always, always the same psychological dynamics. 'Cause it's always, always, always just human nature.

Had no idea that Stewart Brand (of the SF Zen Center) and Jim Fadiman were so close to Kesey, though....

Geez, in between that and Huston Smith's connections with the Good Friday experiment, the endorsements for that old first book of mine ain't lookin' so hot anymore, are they?

Speaking of cults, from John Robbins' Diet for a New America:

In our "civilized" society, the slaughter of innocent animals is not only an accepted practice, it is an established ritual.

We do not usually see ourselves as members of a flesh-eating cult. But all the signs are there. Many of us are afraid to even consider other diet-style choices, afraid to leave the safety of the group, afraid when there is any evidence that might reveal that the god of animal protein isn't quite all it's cracked up to be. Members of the Great American Steak Religion frequently become worried if their family or friends show any signs of disenchantment. A mother may be more worried if her son or daughter becomes a vegetarian than if they take up smoking....

The people responsible for today's slaughterhouses do not find any of [the butchering process] disturbing. They are professionals. To them, the whole business is almost ordinary. They have become so locked into denial that they simply go about their work, which just happens to involve coldly butchering millions of innocent animals. Interviewing them, I've seen what Hannah Arendt saw when she probed the minds of the Nazis. She called it the "banality of evil"; human beings matter-of-factly carrying out unspeakable cruelty, then going home and playing with their children.

By the way, I'm no "Geoffrey come lately" with regard to Robbins' ideas: I first read his Diet for a New America back around 1990 or so, after I had already been vegetarian for three years.

The final irony, of course:

Susan Campbell, who worked extensively with John Robbins (Diet for a New America), is interested in diet and overall well-being, especially for kids. She wrote The Healthy School Lunch, a critically acclaimed book on just that, and is now working on her second book, which uses the four quadrants to design a national nutrition program.

—Ken Wilber, One Taste

As to how Wilber can then be recommending the Atkins diet—which is nearly the opposite of what Robbins has argued for, from both environmental and health perspectives—as part of an Integral Life Practice, well, don't ask me. That Bald Idiot is really too fucking stupid for his own good.

Came across this recently: Russell's Teapot.

If ... the existence of [a mythical] teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.

Amen, Bertrand. You tell 'em.

The Age of Wilberius: Facts and Reality vs. Ken Wilber's "Integral Age".

This is the dawning
This is the dawning
Of the (Integral) Age of Wilberius

God help me, I've been reading Wilber's Integral Spirituality over the weekend.

What happened was, I had been toodling along quite happily doing the 101 things I'd rather be doing, without keeping up-to-date on the latest diuretic effusions of the Bald Bastard of Boulder. But then David Lane's remarkably restrained response to Tom Floyd's pathetically unresearched, misrepresentation-filled and condescending "analysis" (don't make me laugh) of Lane's criticisms of kw's misunderstandings of neo-Darwinian evolution got posted on Integral World.

And what that finally did, after more than a week of annoying the hell out of me over the holidays—Floyd really doesn't have a fucking clue, not that it stops him from pretending to be a "higher holonic" individual, ostensibly above "adversarial" criticisms of kw's shithead "theories"—is to convince me to get "Norman Einstein" into hard-copy print, for sale to libraries and bookstores, etc.

So, in bringing that text more fully up-to-date, I finally caved and ordered the new kw book from amazon. (The Toronto Public Library system, moving at its usual sub-luminal speed, has a bunch of copies "in process," but I didn't feel like waiting.)

Of course, there's (predictably) very little information in the new "masterpiece" that isn't already available elsewhere (esp. online).

The dedication's kinda odd, though:

You know, kw as (in Brad Reynolds' fawning, hagiographic view) an "incarnation of Manjushri" with a word-processor ... a worshipful image which Wilber must really enjoy, to have so clearly referenced it in that dedication. Bigelow is Old Baldy's dedicated assistant who, on the basis of three semesters of undergraduate philosophy, has seen fit to prostitute himself ... sorry, I meant prostrate himself ... before (in his own authoritative/mirroring words) "the world's greatest philosopher-sage."

"Just a bigelow/Everywhere he goes."

Then, there's the Psych 101 drivel from kw about homophobia (p. 120-1):

You might have seen the recent studies where men who were anti-gay-pornography crusaders, and who had dedicated a large portion of their lives to aggressively fighting homosexual porn, were tested for their levels of sexual arousal when shown photos of gay sexual scenes. The crusaders evidenced substantially more sexual arousal than other males. In other words, they themselves were attracted to gay sex but, finding that unacceptable in themselves, spent their lives trying to eradicate it in others, while claiming they had no such nasty desires themselves. Yet all they were really doing was projecting their own despised shadows onto others, then scapegoating them.

The prefatory "Note to the Reader" in Integral Spirituality is dated "Spring, 2006." So, when Wilber blithely trotted out exactly the same comparison with regard to his critics' supposed shadow-projections a few months later, he wasn't just hurriedly making that up in the days after his initial "Wyatt Earpy" posting. Rather, he had supposedly researched it well enough to include it in a formal, edited, nonfiction book. Of course, he still couldn't get it right, instead presenting just one possible explanation out of many, as if it were the only one, in full accord with his own biases and fixations.

(Just about from the beginning of kw's "compassionate meltdown," I've figured that he had the second installment of that inane "Earpy" series—where he complains about his critics supposedly "hating" him—essentially completed well prior to even posting the first one. So, it wouldn't have mattered who blogged about the initial "test," or what tone they took in their responses; anything which wasn't simple "randy toadying," kissing his pathetic ass, was all going to be "shadow-projection" in kw's addled and manipulative mind, regardless. All of that being in accord with Chapter 6 of Integral Spirituality, titled "The Shadow and the Disowned Self.")

Overall, it is kw, not his critics in general, who is obviously rampantly projecting his own fear and hatred out into the world.

Page 204:

Integral Institute has designed a simple but very effective process of accessing and integrating one's personal shadow material....

Yeah, kw himself, "Exhibit A."

Then, from page 87:

Chris Cowan and Natasha Todorovic have done a wonderful job of making much of the original Graves work available to a larger audience.

That, however, contrasts somewhat with kw's derogatory treatment, a mere few months later, of "Cowan and friend," doesn't it?

Again, from page 87:

[F]rom the start, SD® has not incorporated a single criticism, from me or anybody else that I can tell, largely, in my opinion, because it is not possible to have an academic discussion with individuals whose economic livelihood depends upon one model being the only correct model.

Ken, you integral idiot: You've messed up Spiral Dynamics® every which way from the beginnings of your published bumbling oversimplifications and misunderstandings of it, to the point where Cowan himself sternly admonished you for "putting out impressive-sounding junk and nonsense that must be undone if the integrity of the model is to be protected." (He wasn't too impressed with your "Earpy" slings and arrows either, by the sound of it.) And then you want him to take the time to find the slippery truths in your theories, to incorporate into SD? As Bugs Bunny would say, of you now, "Whadda maroon."

Page 203: As one of the nine modules of an "Integral Life Practice," under the Diet options, kw lists: "Atkins, Ornish, the Zone." That's downright irresponsible: Did the Bald Fool even bother to research what the (low-carbohydrate) Atkins diet is. How anyone could be so stupid as to recommend that diet as part of a spiritual discipline is absolutely mind-boggling. Did kw just hear the term in media, figure "Hey, it's a diet, it can be part of integral practice," and not bother researching it even a whit beyond that?

Maybe Wilber just likes the "carbohydrate ladder" and its nine rungs, in the Atkins diet? No, wait: It's not really a ladder, it's more like a Nest. Yeah, a holonic/caloric Nest in the Great Chain of Eating. Huston Smith wrote a classic book about it, didn't he?

So yeah: Carnivorous Atkins for the Body, reportedly psychoses-inducing TM for the Spirit, "Integral Ethics" ... in a few months, "you won't even recognize yourself."

(Actually, in looking over those nine ILP modules, I see that I've been practicing explicit elements from most of them [i.e., from six of the nine, or seven of nine back when I was meditating] on a very regular basis for all of my adult life so far. You'd think, from all that, I might be more than just a "altitude-impaired, toxic green shit" by now, eh? Conversely, though, if you want proof that Integral Life Practice doesn't work ... well, since I've been [unintentionally] practicing it for twenty years already, I would consider myself to be walking proof that it's a load of second-tier shit. Aside, you know, from the obvious, common-sense benefits to body and mind of living a balanced life, which no one should need a pandit or guru to outline to them.)

And, of course, there's always the old Wilberian standby (p. 137, 197), false though it may be:

[M]editation can help move you an average of two vertical stages in four years [emphasis is in the original]....

No other single practice or technique—not therapy, not breathwork, not transformative workshops, not role-taking, not hatha yoga—has been empirically demonstrated to do this. Meditation alone has done so. For example, whereas around 2% of the adult population is at second tier, after four years of meditation, that 2% goes to 38% in the meditation group [uh, in which 9 percent were at second-tier to begin with]. This is truly staggering research.

Khrist, don't even get me started on that one. It's already well over a year, now, since I showed that claim (based as it is on Skip Alexander's ineptly performed "staggering research") to be utterly false. And, for the nth time, it was eleven years of meditation, not four, that got 38 percent of Alexander's subjects to test at the autonomous/integrated level. That is stated in goddamned black-and-white on pages 332-3 of Alexander's Higher Stages of Human Development.

For Wilber to continue to the present day with his utterly dishonest/incompetent twisting of that research is beyond despicable: His claim there is bald-faced bullshit. Anyone who wants to check out the relevant pages in Alexander's book can easily verify that for him/herself. (His own term for such deceptions, I believe, based on his paranoid, cult-leading response to Jim Chamberlain, would be "lies." In this case, one is strongly tempted to agree with that designation, given the repeated and unapologetic violations of truth by Wilber on this particular point: Any honest person, even an utterly incompetent quack, could hardly keep making that same mistake time after time, and still lay claim to any form of conscience.)

Likewise for another of the standard Wilberian deceits (p. 43):

[T]he Great Wisdom Traditions ... offered all the verifiable evidence one could want within a remarkably modern paradigm.

Yeah, sure. Uh-huh. As long as you completely ignore the glaring problem, pointed out by competent skeptics more than half a dozen years ago, that Wilber "implicitly accepts the reality of mystical experiences, and it is sufficient for him that his scientific mystics test their internal experiences against nothing more than each other's internal experiences. How this would eliminate group bias or error is not discussed." But then, that's just typical of what passes for "verifiable evidence" in Wilber's World.

More, from page 297:

Rupert [Sheldrake's] ... use of Waddington's notion of morphogenic fields, or morphic fields, ... happens to be a completely viable scientific hypothesis.

"A completely viable scientific hypothesis."

Evidence, Kensho? I mean, you can hypothesize anything. And hypotheses which are confirmed become (components of) theories, and theories which stand the test of time may come to be regarded as laws. But what the hell is "viable scientific hypothesis" supposed to mean, in the absence of competently conducted experiments to confirm or deny the educated guess? What purported facts of nature, as established by competent experimentation, which can't be explained by known laws, are you even trying to explain? 'Cause simple coincidences, ignorantly taken as if they were kosmically meaningful, don't require any new "viable scientific hypotheses." All you need is Statistics 101. (The skeptical, scientific view of Sheldrake's wilber-esque attempts at experimentation? Right here, and here.)

Page 169:

[L]et's understand the fundamental rule of any reality check: if I want to know if something is real, I must get in the same state or stage from which the assertion was issued, and then look. If I don't do that, then please, I shouldn't talk about things that are over my head.... [T]hat lets us see why (as we have found out the hard way) doing more brain research for those who are not in the corresponding state or stage convinces them of nothing....

Wrong Again, Ken: Skeptics don't need to meditate or learn to see/imagine auras or do (claimed) Schlitz-like astral traveling (in purported remote viewing), for example. All they need to do is set up appropriate real-world tests of the people making those claims, and apply elementary statistics to the results. If those paranormal claims turn out, via those simple but devastating experiments, to not be predictive at anything beyond a "chance" level, then the same skeptics are fully qualified—much moreso than kw will ever be—to pronounce on the likely "reality" of the associated interior experiences.

When those elementary tests invariably show that persons who are claiming to be able to see auras, etc., cannot actually do so in any better-than-guessing ways, and when real scientists then understandably remain unconvinced of the even-wilder claims (as to the experience of Godhead, etc.) made by comparable individuals, it ain't 'cause it's all "over their heads"—even if the most basic principles of high-school-level science may well be over your head, Kenny. On the contrary, if your experience of any astral, causal or nondual state is "as real" as is your perception of subtle energies, too bad for you. 'Cause, until you muster the courage to actually have the latter claimed sensing-abilities tested, those "subtle" experiences must be taken as being merely imagined, given that that has been the result encountered by everyone else who has ever made comparable claims and, unlike you, at least had guts enough to put them to the test in properly controlled studies.

If you can't even get subtle energies (with their easily testable, exterior correlates) right, yet you remain convinced that your experience of them is "real," why should anyone take seriously your vouching for the existence of higher states of consciousness and levels of reality, based on your own surely comparably deluded/imagined interior experiences of them? (Simply put, they shouldn't: As a wise man once observed, if you can't even get the testable stuff right, there is no reason why anyone should take your word for even more rarefied "things unseen.")

Give Kensho credit for one thing, though: Integral Spirituality is written at such a high (i.e., general, non-detailed) level that it completely obscures all of the ways in which the foundations of his half-baked notions simply don't fit together. If you didn't know any better, you might well indeed think that Integral Spirituality was, as Dennis Genpo Merzel blurbs, "possibly the most important spiritual book in postmodern times." And next thing you knew, you'd be throwing your money away on overpriced seminars in the hope of catching a glimpse of the Great Wilber, semi-volunteering your time for the organization "for the good of all humankind," and perhaps even (dare we dream?) working your way into the inner circle at I-I ... or IU ... or IN ... or ILP, with no comprehension at all of what sorrows you were setting yourself up for, should you fail to check your (UR) brain and independence at the door to the "sanctuary."

"Integrate" all of the fairy tales you like; it still won't make them any more real than are kw's own merely imagined experience of subtle energies and their relation to Q-Links, or any other obvious quackery. Nor will it save you from the utterly predictable, social-psychology-based abuses inherent in any closed, hierarchical society whose higher members crave respect and are conversely intolerant of disobedience and questioning. That is so even if such a society is led and unthinkingly followed by people (esp. raging, authoritarian narcissists such as kw himself) who imagine themselves to be "second tier."

Wilber further updates his stance on neo-Darwinian evolution (p. 236, 241-2):

To say that the manifest universe is evolving is not necessarily to endorse all of the neo-Darwinian view of evolution. I did my graduate work in the biochemistry and biophysics of the visual process ("The photoisomerization of rhodopsin isolated from bovine rod outer segments"), and what we don't understand about the mechanisms of evolution could fill the Library of Congress several times over. I'm no fan of Intelligent Design, either, which is just Creation Science in drag. But you don't need an intelligent designer to realize that evolution seems to involve some sort of "creative allure," or what Whitehead called "the creative advance into novelty." That drive—Eros by any other name—seems a perfectly realistic conclusion, given the facts of evolution as we understand them. [???] Let's just say there is plenty of room for a Kosmos of Eros. But the whole point of a post-metaphysics is that it is the strict application of Occam's razor, refusing to postulate more entities when fewer will do the trick. It's just that Eros is one of those things that just doesn't seem to go away....

Proponents of ID have one truth on their side: scientific materialism cannot explain all of evolution (it can explain pretty much everything except major holistic transformational leaps). [Which "leaps" are these? The evolutionary development of eyes, or of wings? KW doesn't say. But the latter, anyway, is the bad, bad example which he gives in ABHOE of an evolutionary leap which neo-Darwinianism supposedly can't explain. If he has better examples, why doesn't he give them? Answer: He has no better examples than those long-discredited ones.] With that, I quite agree. But all that is required to get and keep evolution moving forward is a minimalist Eros (as an involutionary given). This force of creative advance into novelty is one form of Spirit-in-action, and that Eros is all that is then required for evolutionary theory to work just fine. That's why evolution shows so many fits and starts; it's a creative artwork, not an intelligent engineering product (because if so, that Engineer is an idiot). The proponents of ID parlay their one little truth into the demand that the Jehovah of Genesis be that Eros, and there is not the slightest evidence for that anywhere in heaven or on earth.

If you say so, Ken. Have you read any good books by ID-proponent Michael Behe lately, that you might want to endorse, as you've stupidly done in the past, showing your own ignorance of the field in which you not only have formal training but claim to keep up with "religiously"?

And, as far as Occam's razor goes: In the next breath (or previous appendix, in this case), kw will be grandly theorizing about the nature of subtle energies—another one of the phenomena which he probably thinks just "won't go away," in spite of there being zero properly vetted experimental evidence for their existence. From Occam's razor ... to Wilber's unduly shaved head.

The guy is veneer-ealy "scientific" only as long as it suits him; when it doesn't, he's off again on his Magic Karpet Ride, multiplying entities throughout the astral and causal levels, into infinity, with plenty of morphogenic fields thrown in, as part of the same "integral parsimony."

That Wilber (p. 87) would criticize SD for being "bound up with the discredited notion of memes" while simultaneously needing/touting morphogenic fields in his Wilber-5 in order for it to be a "post-metaphysics" with evolving Kosmic "habits" and "grooves" rather than pregiven higher levels of reality is downright funny. And then he spouts proudly about his one little application of Occam's razor in an integral Sea of woo-woo phenomena whose exteriors by all competent experimental indications simply don't exist, but are rather merely imagined?! (And, if the exteriors don't exist, and if all four of kw's kwadrants tetra-manifest and tetra-evolve, then the interiors don't exist either, in any ontologically real way.)

It's just as well that kw dropped out of his Ph.D. in evolutionary biology: He would have never been even remotely competent as a scientist anyway ... though he might well have managed to put himself in line for one of James Randi's "Pigasus" awards, for world-class quackery. (Nominate him under the "Refusal to face reality" category ... while duly noting that I-I's Gary Schwartz was the 2001 winner in the "Scientist" category, and that Wilber's transpersonal friend Charles Tart [complimentary referenced in Integral Spirituality] took home the prize in 1981.)

And, as far as ID'ers allegedly demanding that "the Jehovah of Genesis be that Eros," I had already posted the following direct quote, back in May of 2005, on Integral Naked, in response to Wilber's related anti-Darwinian driveling (and unresearched, fabricated "facts" about "Jehovah in a Hummer"), there:

Although the [Intelligent Design] movement is loosely allied with, and heavily funded by, various conservative Christian groups—and although ID plainly maintains that life was created—it is generally silent about the identity of the creator.

That Bald Bastard just can't get it right, can he? It's the same attempted deceptions from him, over and over again. And you really think that Wilber-5 might have less garbage like that in it than did Wilber-4, or any of his earlier attempts at bullshit-theorizing? If you do still hope for that: How slowly do you learn? Or, alternatively, how much do you enjoy being lied to? 'Cause you must really enjoy/need it, to keep coming back for more.

From p. 209 (take a deep breath, this is all one sentence):

In the relative world of finite manifestation, an AQAL map is a useful guide to the dimensions of a human being-in-8-worlds, and if we include all of those dimensions and methodologies in our maps of reality, I honestly believe we will see Spirit shining fully in the premodern, modern, and postmodern world, and see a way to bring them all together in a gesture of easy embrace and graceful inclusion, like a full-course meal and not just the appetizer, saturating our being with our Being, and thus Being in the AQAL world with presence and delight, wonder and release, recognition and surrender, humor and lightness, surprise and rightness, justness and relief—it all somehow comes pouring through, drenching us in Being and Consciousness and Duty and Bliss....

Which finds itself exploding in its own superabundance, unfolding in its own evolutionary plenitude, a riotous development that is loving envelopment, an evolution of Spirit that spins off Kosmic memories of its own yesterday while laying down Kosmic habits as the foundation of its own tomorrow (don't You remember?), so that with a Kosmic conveyor belt—a great and grand and glorious Spiritual elevator—religion has found its place in the modern and postmodern world.

Egad, it's the "Integral Tuna" piece all over again: KW really could have said everything in that parody, as below. "Purple"-meme prose and all.

So Phase II will literally be the phenomenon of an integral wake, created by a 2nd tier ship, built by 2nd tier pioneers and pilgrims, drawing up living, non-integral tuna, through lines, levels, states and stages in the vast sea of emptiness and transforming them into canned tuna—which in my opinion, anyway, will do nothing short of adding to the sublimity and nutritiousness of an already stout and exquisite integral salad. I mean, is this cool or what?....

For in the suspension of disbelief, as we transcend and include, we re-absorb and re-integrate what can only be looked at as a new and improved, always and already improving, pre/trans fallacy, fresh, formless and wet from birth, molded integrally solid and purified in the crucible of integral kilns (the virtual autoclaves of the future) with the fire of Spirit (which has been so horribly abused, misused, kicked around, suffocated and oppressed for too long, but will nonetheless be revealed, healed, polished and preserved by our undying mission to let Spirit have its rightful seat that the traditions teach us it should) and this new improved pre/trans fallacy becomes the solid trans/phallic bow of our integral ship ever pioneering onward with a heart full of courage and undying love and commitment to uplift all of those that thirst for something more than what the tired old bloated belly of conventional, modern, post-modern and pre-post-pseudo-meta integral thought can offer, for all that have had even just a glimpse of the vast emptiness that is your true being, your true heart that reaches out to the infinite corners of the Kosmos and says I love you, I love me and I am simply astonished and amazed and I know I have something to give and to give it and to want to live from this space fully and artfully with the skillful means and a body to match (we don't want to neglect the physical) and maybe even abundantly with something to show for our own life for God's sake. This is what integral is and I don't know about you but I just think that it is so cool.

Finally, even if all of Wilber's Integral Methodological Pluralism and recent post-metaphysical musings were valid, he has presented not a shred of properly vetted, independently repeated experimental evidence that his Integral Life Practice (or any other spiritual practice, for that matter) is likely to induce psychological stage-growth in its adherents. So, while he may well have avoided metaphysics in favor of "injunctions" galore, his promises of stage-growth within "four years," etc., are utterly hollow: He is promising advancement for which he truly has no evidence. (The "two stages in four years" claim is again a pure fabrication on his part, gotten from his inept conflating of several different studies done by Alexander and others.)

So, whatever may remain standing, a decade from now, of the ideas in Wilber's latest theorizings—not to mention of his presentations of "integral history," or of various culture-wide dissociations, on which sort of thing he is a notoriously and provably unreliable source of information (as Meyerhoff, for one, has shown)—in terms of the practice, and of people's real lives, he is still selling kosmic snake oil, suckering people in through utterly misrepresentative "advertising" in terms of his false claims for its supposedly proven stage-growth benefits.

In the real, business world, companies get hit with class-action suits for making comparably unsubstantiated claims for the supposed benefits of their products. (And yes, people are indeed paying for the integral "product," in overpriced seminars, equally overpriced ILP Starter Kits, and the like.)

P.S. Tom Floyd, thank you for not having even a glimmer of a clue. You, like Elliot Benjamin flailing around before you, have spurred me ("Earpy" pun not intended) to find the time and energy to do the right thing, in getting NE into hard-copy, and thus again into libraries and bookstores before the end of this year.

By all means "critique the critics." But if you're going to do so, you have the obligation to get it right, rather than stupidly hiding behind obvious misrepresentations, condescension, and utterly untenable feelings of superiority.

If you ever find yourself in that sort of situation, this information may help.

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