Blog — May, 2006

Slippery Dick: A "small wrasse of tropical Atlantic."

Wrasse: "Any of a large family (Labridae) of elongate compressed usually brilliantly colored marine bony fishes that usually bury themselves in sand at night and include important food fishes as well as a number of popular aquarium fishes."

And it lives on bananas....

Ooh, Chapter 6 of Meyerhoff's fantastic Bald Ambition is online! From which:

In the space of one page [in Wilber's SES] we've moved from [the real quote from Alfred North Whitehead, not used by Wilber] "the European philosophic tradition consists of a series of footnotes to Plato" to "Western civilization is a series of footnotes to Plato." Besides being shockingly poor scholarship, this distortion raises an interesting question: Why does Wilber distort Whitehead's quote in just that way?

The answer is that Wilber wants a duality in Plato's thinking to be the essential duality driving Western civilization; "the dualism of which all other Western dualisms are merely an incidental subset." To do that, the influence of Plato has to be inflated, hence the [dishonest] changes in Whitehead's aphorism.

Bingo, bingo, bingo!

While perhaps not reaching the transcendent heights that Wilber requires of it, Reardon's study demonstrates how integral an ascendant spirituality or other-worldliness was to Romanticism's great interest in nature and history's this-worldliness. This directly contradicts Wilber's characterization of it as mired in "flatland ontology."

Beautiful. If you can handle the truth, that is; inarguably cogent arguments and thorough research like Meyerhoff so often provides really are wonderful.

Back before last Christmas, I spent three months researching and writing the most interesting third of a new book: Rock & Holy Rollers: The Spiritual Beliefs Of Chart-Topping Rock Stars, In Their Lives And Lyrics. With having gotten dragged back into doing full-time programming since then, I have no idea when or if I'll ever find the time and inclination to spend the additional 2500 hours which RHR would require to finish. (Just in finally re-ordering the Black Sabbath quote references, I noticed that I've failed to record the titles and page numbers for half a dozen of them. And I've since discarded those books. And I'm sure as hell not going to purchase them again and re-read them....)

So, here's the book so far in PDF (419 KB) and HTML, with only a little attempt made at "prettying up" the manuscript. And, the PDF Chapter Outline, for the two-thirds of the book which exists only in ... well, outline.

What do George Harrison, Peter Gabriel, Van Morrison, Jon Anderson (of Yes), Kerry Livgren (of Kansas), and Madonna have in common?

They've all been convinced, at one time or another, that Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi was a record of real events, which could beneficially be taken seriously.

Stumbled, quite accidentally, on this "A Light in the Wilberness" shrine to Saint Ken, today:

From his footnotes and bibliographies alone, Wilber seems omniscient....

And as with meditation, clean living and exercise, one feels so much better after reading a little Wilber....

In my opinion, this [four-quadrant] tool is one of the greatest inventions ever proposed for orienting human beings toward their own evolution....

A Brief History ... is bound to seduce even the most casual reader into plunging into the intoxicating revelations of all the wise old trees to be found in the great magical Wilberness.

Do you see why I have to keep exposing Wilber for the clueless, dishonest, manipulative, cult-leading fool that he is? Because just a few years ago I could have read the above load of adulatory garbage and actually believed it! And while for 98% of the "spiritual" community there is nothing which I or anyone else could ever say or do to get them thinking clearly, there are people who go into the "spiritual quest" more interested in truth than in being fed pleasant lies and delusions. And it would be a shame for any of those few to get fooled simply by the "consensus" of a community which "can't tell shit from Shinola," and which will fight you tooth and nail should you dare to point out even the glaring differences to them.

'Cause, you know, the same Brian Van der Horst who was responsible for the above ruminations on the "great magical Wilberness" (jeezus khrist....) is a founding member of the Integral Psychology department at I-I. Stands to reason, doesn't it? No "obsequious ass kissers" among Wilber's collection of hundreds of the "finest scholars in the world"? On the contrary, no one could remain for long in that "inner sanctum" of the Wilberian community without being intimately familiar with all four quadrants of kw's posterior.

You may also have noticed Van der Horst's "professional" interest in Neuro-Linguistic Programming. About which:

[M]uch of what NLP is teaching is how to do cold reading. This is valuable, but an art not a science, and should be used with caution....

While ... many people benefit from NLP training sessions, there seem to be several false or questionable assumptions upon which NLP is based. Their beliefs about the unconscious mind, hypnosis and the ability to influence people by appealing directly to the subconscious mind are unsubstantiated. All the scientific evidence which exists on such things indicates that what NLP claims is not true....

It seems that NLP develops models which can't be verified, from which it develops techniques which may have nothing to do with either the models or the sources of the models. NLP makes claims about thinking and perception which do not seem to be supported by neuroscience. This is not to say that the techniques won't work. They may work and work quite well, but there is no way to know whether the claims behind their origin are valid. Perhaps it doesn't matter. NLP itself proclaims that it is pragmatic in its approach: what matters is whether it works. However, how do you measure the claim "NLP works"? I don't know and I don't think NLPers know, either. Anecdotes and testimonials seem to be the main measuring devices. Unfortunately, such a measurement may reveal only how well the trainers teach their clients to persuade others to enroll in more training sessions.

Meyerhoff:

Edwards describes Wilber's principle of nonexclusion and uses it to argue that we should not use scholars outside of a field of knowledge to judge the results of scholars within a field of knowledge because the scholars within the field are the experts. In Wilber's language, the scholars within the field have followed the injunctions, or the methods for looking at their field's object of study; had the apprehensions, or perceived (or didn't perceive) what is (or isn't) there; and, checked with the community of inquirers who have followed these three strands of knowledge acquisition and had their results confirmed by that community. Nonexclusion is the idea that differing fields of knowledge study differing phenomena in ways particular to their field, so that people outside the field, who study different phenomena with different methodologies, can't usefully comment on what goes on in another field.

Heh. Well, as far as Wilber's laughably ad hoc principle of "nonexclusion" goes: If he were to actually apply that principle, he'd be the first one to be disqualified from having anything to say that was worth hearing (not to mention barred from having his "expert, scholarly" opinion quoted by his equally clueless transpersonal/integral peers)! Not that that ever stopped him from bumbling his way through Bohmian physics, though. (Yes, he took some undergraduate courses in physics. Woo-hoo. You have to be a whole lot more self-honest than Kensho has ever been to be competently self-taught to a post-graduate level in any subject. Without that, you may well end up, like kw, trashing Nobel Prize-caliber ideas which you/he has never even come close to understanding.)

Plus: Could he have come up with a better way of dismissing the criticisms against himself and his addled ideas by people outside the integral field? That is, people who by definition "can't usefully comment on what goes on" there, for not having meditated until they hallucinated, etc. (Wilber's Up from Eden was based on a vision he once had of the spiritual-evolutionary unfolding—in ontogeny and phylogeny—of the kosmos, you know. That should have been a red flag right there, regarding the man's inability to distinguish reality from his own fantasies/fabrications.)

Of course, Wilber claims (falsely) to be accurately representing the "agreed-upon-knowledge" in the fields which he includes in his Fore Kwadrants, thus conveniently giving himself a free pass on the difficulties of commenting on or evaluating areas in which he has no formal training and has made no recognized, peer-reviewed academic contributions. But, what happens, then, if you disagree with his frequently ineptly/dishonestly created "orienting generalizations," executed on fields in which he has no more training than you do? Surely it's just a matter of time until he pulls some new principle out of his ass to protect his half-baked ideas against that!

As with all true quacks, who pretend to value "constructive criticism" until it shows them up to be complete fools, and who then hide behind the fallacy of "inferior-to-them" others supposedly not understanding their "brilliance," that man's true colors are finally showing, far too blatantly. Of course, that will make no difference whatsoever to the 98% of the members of the integral community who have never been able, and will never be able, to think for themselves. But for anyone who wants to see the intolerance and even gross incapacity for rational thinking there, it's painfully obvious.

Ken Wilber on the War in Iraq:

I personally believe that any protest movement that does not equally protest both America's invasion and Saddam's murder of 400,000 people is a protest movement that does not truly represent peace or non-aggression or worldcentric values.

I am aware of no major protest movement that has protested both forms of violence equally, and that has insisted upon an immediate end to both aggressions, and offered a believable way that both aggressions could actually be halted immediately so that neither side can continue its homicidal actions.

That is, I am aware of no integral protest movement anywhere in the world, unfortunately.

Amnesty International is a "major protest movement." While not officially condemning the war in Iraq, to any right-of-center political perspective they have done much more to "harm" the American cause there than to aid it:

Critics of AI have suggested that AI's concern for the human rights implications of this war disproportionately criticize the effects of U.S. military action while in comparison they were less vociferous about the abuses of the Hussein regime and the human rights implications of the continued rule of this government.

And yet—

Supporters of AI have pointed out that AI was critical of Hussein's regime while Donald Rumsfeld was shaking the Iraqi leader by the hand, and that when the White House later released reports on the human rights record of Hussein, they depended almost entirely on AI documents that the U.S. had ignored when Iraq was a U.S. ally in the 1980s.

Indeed, "the September/October 1988 [Amnesty International] newsletter's lead article was an appeal to the United Nations Security Council to 'act immediately to stop the massacre of Kurdish civilians by Iraqi forces' under Saddam Hussein."

I suppose Wilber could always hide behind the idea that AI hasn't protested those two sets of evils exactly equally—which, by definition, it couldn't have, regardless of which side it might (or might not) have favored. (Plus, in not officially taking a stand against the Iraq war, AI has obviously explicitly protested it far less than they have objected to the tortures and mass murders under Saddam's rule. So, evidently, in order to show themselves to be properly integral, they should be protesting it more, odd as that may sound given their mission and history.) Amnesty also probably doesn't have a plan to offer in which "both aggressions [i.e., the invasion of Iraq, vs. Saddam's mass murders] could actually be halted immediately." Do you? Does kw? Not bloody likely.

Really, by kw's own absurd third criterion of needing to have presented such a plan in order to qualify as "integral" in his judgment, he fails as miserably as anyone: Not only is there no movement which meets that third (and quite unnecessary, in terms of evaluating one's good intentions or state/stage of consciousness) standard, there is probably even not a single individual who does. (If there were a workable and obviously correct political solution to that problem, which kept everyone honest in the process, Bush would never have gotten away with that rushed invasion in the first place.) So why does kw even bother framing all that? Why does he set it up so that, in practical terms, no movement could possibly be "integral" with regard to the Iraq conflict ... even while he himself and his institute are "integral" by definition?

My strong suspicion? He's doing it to reserve high integrality only for meditative beings such as himself, regardless of how superior the behavior of others may be in practice when compared to his own dismal ideas and character. If you disagree, consider kw's clueless, self-aggrandizing statement, in One Taste, that "until the ecologists understand that the ozone hole, pollution, and toxic wastes are all completely part of the Original Self, they will never gain enlightened awareness, which alone knows how to proceed with these pressing problems." There, too, he is basically integral by definition, even though being ecologically unconscious in practice. That he would have ever put the above "ozone" ruminations into print, without considering how blatantly self-celebrating and openly grandiose they are, smacks of something far worse than a mere occasional "mental lapse." And again: Where is his workable, integral solution to the ecological crisis? Nowhere, even for ostensibly having the highest "enlightened, integral awareness."

Given all that, it's no surprise that any other movement, such as Amnesty, composed merely of "ordinary mortals," must be "non-integral" ... until its members (who obviously overlap significantly with the ecological movement) attain to the same exalted state of consciousness as kw thinks he possesses. It can't be just coincidence: that thread runs through too much of his "philosophy" to not be meaningful.

Consider also the perspective of Greenpeace—the typical "green" organization, explicitly cited as such by kw himself—in outlining their reasons for officially protesting the war in Iraq from the beginning:

We don't support Saddam Hussein. We don't back any governments or political leaders. When we decided to take a stand against this war, it was because we see a far greater danger in the concept of preventive war....

For one nation to take arms against another because it believes that nation to be a threat undermines the foundations of peaceful coexistence, multilateral institutions like the United Nations, and an "entire web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values," to quote John Brady Kiesling's letter of resignation from the U.S. diplomatic core.

As tempting as it may be to those who view Saddam as a cipher of evil to step in and remove him militarily, one has to ask what's next?

After the U.S. conducts a preventive war on Iraq, will it set its sights on Iran? North Korea? And if the U.S. can wage a preventive war to protect its national security, shouldn't India or Pakistan have the same right?

This is the first step on a slippery slope. It ends with the United Nations in tatters and the rule of might making right.

Well, at least one thing is certain: Given Wilber's own habitual and slippery use of "lies in the service of a (perceived) higher good," he's in good company with Bush and Blair. All three are masters in the unapologetic fabrication of "evidence" to be utilized for the unconscionable manipulation of others. And, in the heat of what little barely-rational (or less) debate is actually allowed, failing to go readily along with their manipulations can only make you either "non-integral" or traitorously "un-American." (Just ask the Dixie Chicks.)

You're concerned about Ken "Warhead" Wilber going privately ballistic whenever his ideas are publicly questioned? Just be thankful he doesn't go intercontinentally ballistic. (And yet, in a sense, he does.)

By the way, the "second tier" (by Wilberian decree) Tony Blair and his wife are complete "believers" in the New Age/transpersonal shite from which Wilber derives his own reputation—members of, as one of James Randi's readers puts it, the "Axis of Irrationality."

Utterly pre-rational in their religious beliefs, but admirably trans-rational in their politics? Talk about holding multiple perspectives at once....

"And it was all Yellow (value meme)...."

"Blessed are the Cheesemakers."

Who knew?

Be honest: You've always wondered what Noah's wife was really like, haven't you?

She faithfully helped Noah during several hundred years of farming (5:29), up to 120 years of boat-building, more than a year of zoo-keeping (under divine guidance) on an enormous houseboat, then during a few hundred years of farming with a side-line in wine-making (Genesis 9). She also supported him in his preaching ministry (2 Peter 2:5).

(I never realized Eve was a voluptuous blonde. The "Original Shiksa.")

Was reading Meyerhoff's "Six Criticisms of Wilber's Integral Theory" and his "What's Worthy of Inclusion?" today:

Instead of the image of Wilber being confronted with a vast array of knowledge and fitting it together like a jigsaw puzzle, a more plausible explanation is that he already had a progressive, developmental, dialectical story of the Kosmos in mind and found, not the orienting generalizations of the sciences, but cherry-picked scholars who appear to validate the view he wants to be true.

Yes, but it's actually much worse than that: Reading that fine collection of documented misrepresentations by kw, it again becomes obvious that he either has not understood (even at an undergraduate level) the basic knowledge in the fields which he purports to be synthesizing. Or, if he has understood it, he is unconscionably twisting/misrepresenting it to suit his "theories," expecting to get away with that, for never having been properly critiqued by his cotton-headed peers in transpersonal psychology. (And, prior to 1996 or so, he really didn't get caught! So, the implicit confidence was actually quite justified.) No competent, honest person could be as consistently wrong as kw is in (mis)representing other scholars' positions to make them appear as if they support his own—always getting things wrong in ways which benefit his own position. So, he's either incompetent or dishonest (or both). Take your pick. Either way, in what other field could one be credited with "brilliance," when the choice is really only between the former two damnations?

Of course, that makes no difference to the chosen members of the integral religion:

[T]he more cogent the criticism [of Wilber's ideas] the more there is a need [by him and his followers] to avoid them through ... ad hominem arguments....

In the world of real science, not only was Ludwig Boltzmann driven to suicide by the relentless criticism of his colleagues for his correct support of the then-controversial atomic hypothesis around a century ago, but the Nobel Prize-winner Wolfgang Pauli, decades later, was renowned for his own scathing destructions of several ideas which, years later, went on to win Nobel Prizes. That is what you may expect to have directed your way if you venture into real fields of academia, even when bringing valid ideas into them which challenge the norm, never mind the quack philosophy from which Wilber has made his living for more than three decades, now.

In the transpersonal and integral world, however, one finds more of a "covenant of lunatics," whereby it is implicitly agreed that, if I take your "imaginary friend" (i.e., spiritual experiences and theories) as being real, you will in turn take seriously my delusions and elevation of perfectly normal phenomena to the status of paranormality. And neither of us will ever properly criticize the other, because "it's all good."

If you find the existence of that implicit "covenant" and its effects difficult to accept, consider the following independent observation regarding the probable causes of widespread contemporary prejudice toward atheists: "It is possible that the increasing tolerance for religious diversity may have heightened awareness of religion itself as the basis for solidarity in American life and sharpened the boundary between believers and nonbelievers in our collective imagination." Same dynamic, even in a comparable context, except instead of hallucinations and the like being a common bond worthy of mutual respect, it's belief in a Big, Rule-Enforcing Daddy in Heaven. In both cases, though, "religious tolerance" and the death of reason go hand-in-hand, and are further accompanied by a blatant intolerance for others outside of that covenant.

So, no surprise by now that one is indeed allowed to respectfully find small, "correctable" flaws in the work of the Heroes (on whom be peace), and still remain a member in good standing of the integral cult. But, uncover glaring and/or fatal shortcomings in the ideas, and provable incompetence/dishonesty in their creators' work and character, and what can you be but an "untrustworthy asshole"? Or at least, as Meyerhoff has experienced, be dismissed as "altitudinally-challenged" in proportion to the strength of your arguments against the foolish, grandiose likes of the bumbling Wilber?

Meyerhoff again:

There is a tautological element to any claim that in-group agreement alone confers validity upon the idea agreed upon. Here's the tautology: To be a member of a group one has to believe in the idea that makes one a member of the group. Once one stops believing in that idea one is no longer a member of the group. All groups are self-selecting around the belief that makes one a member of the group. If you stop believing, you are out of the group. So consensus alone is not a good enough criterion for validity. Of course, Edwards and Wilber agree that practicing the three strands of any valid knowledge quest is necessary to constitute the kind of group they are interested in. But even allowing this, we're back where we started from because it is in-group community consensus, the third strand in any valid knowledge quest, which determines whether members have valid knowledge.

Couldn't have said it better myself. If the likes of Mark Edwards and Wilber can't see the obvious cogency in such arguments ... geez, are those two even at a functionally rational level yet, in their practical/integral activities?

Not to mention even more sophomore-level internal inconsistencies and circular arguments in kw's ideas themselves, even without comparing them to "reality":

Wilber contends that vision-logic incorporates the poststructural insight of contexts within contexts, yet he leaves out the crucial poststructural contextualization: the contextualization of oneself, the observer. Wilber reacts with such vehemence when confronting the relativists, and takes such repeated delight in exposing their alleged self-contradiction—they supposedly make the absolute statement that "all is relative"—because their alleged contradiction is his actual contradiction. His contradiction is that, on the one hand, he wants to claim that he is practicing a non-reductionistic, aperspectival synthesis of the partial truths of knowledge while, on the other hand, he is actually using an unacknowledged perspective and criterion of truth in order to decide what will count as truth. He uses the fiction of the orienting generalization, and its purported sanction of what he considers the facts, to promote as universal his highly partisan and selective vision of what is true for all....

Wilber's unreliable reporting of the results of scholarly research is one central feature of my critique and this same problem arises, although less severely than usual, when he justifies vision-logic by citing scholarly research....

As Wilber himself says, in a curious statement for someone who says he's relying upon the scholarly consensus for the validity of his integration,

[a version of the postmodern green meme, with its pluralism and relativism] has also made developmental studies, which depend on second-tier [higher stage] thinking, virtually anathema at both conventional and alternative universities.

This statement is so mistaken that I wonder if Wilber had a mental lapse when writing it since Wilber also contends, in that very same piece, that the developmental models he uses have the sanction of mainstream academia. In addition, even a superficial survey shows that developmental studies are well ensconced in academe.

One example of an orienting generalization which Wilber uses that is not "largely-agreed-upon" is Piaget's basic stages of cognitive development. All children who develop normally are supposed to go through these basic stages. Piaget's theory of cognitive development is central to Wilber's description of the individual's interior development. Yet in my chapter on individual development I cite five professors of psychology, all with concentrations in developmental psychology....

Wilber, writing a few years after these negative assessments, writes that "as for the cognitive line itself, Piaget's work is still very impressive; moreover, after almost three decades of intense cross-cultural research, the evidence is virtually unanimous: Piaget's stages up to formal operational are universal and cross-cultural."

Note also, please, that Meyerhoff's use of direct, block quotes from original sources is no more of a "wretched, 12th grade term paper" writing style than is my own. Rather, it is simply what you need to do in order to show that you're not just "Wilberizing" another person's viewpoint. Without that, you'll have great difficulty not being guilty yourself of "Wilber's usual treatment of critics: caricaturing their positions and not quoting anyone in order to avoid the difficult problems that true critics would raise." But, of course, to those who need to believe that the Wilber Claus is real, the problem can only be with others who don't share the same fantasies: "Why can't they learn to write, or learn to think cogently? What's wrong with them?!" Further, say what you want about Fritjof Capra, for example—i.e., has the man ever had an original, professional-level idea himself, or is it all just rehashings of the work of real scientists?—but at least he can paraphrase competently and honestly. Not so for The Great Kensho.

More, from Meyerhoff's Chapter 3:

Wilber's argument [about why differences in levels of consciousness are supposedly to blame for other persons not being able, even in principle, to understand his ideas] is so weak that another explanation has to be found for why he's asserting it. It's obvious to me that this is a transparent, and somewhat sad, attempt to avoid criticism by devising a rationale that invalidates the criticizer. If, as he often laments, people don't understand his theory, the explanation lies in their not being cognitively developed enough to understand it. In addition, all the explaining in the world will not help because they are constitutionally unable to understand; therefore no attempt even needs to be made. And, any criticism the critic makes can be ignored because of the lower level of consciousness of the person making it. Wilber is committing the common fallacy of the ad hominem argument—the argument against the man.

Bingo.

With regard to "altitudinal challenges," as I've noted previously, my own first book was enthusiastically endorsed by both Huston Smith and James Fadiman, two of the three most respected individuals in the transpersonal world (kw himself would be the other). I was actually told by my publisher, Paul Clemens—like Smith and Fadiman, a long-time member of the Board of Editors of The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology—that he considered me to be a "teacher" in the spiritual world. I'm sure he no longer feels that way, though, considering that he cold-turkey stopped responding to my completely reasonable, publishing-related emails to him shortly after the April, 2004 release of SOS ... around the same time as I started being publicly skeptical about transpersonal claims, and about kw in particular. Nor, for that matter, have I seen a (supposedly bi-annual) royalty statement in over a year. At least they FINALLY got around to enabling the "Search inside this book" feature on amazon.com, though. (All that's required there is for the publisher to send a copy of the book in; amazon does the rest. Around two years, that took.) Since that allows you to not only read two pages forward and two pages back from any page you bring up in a search, with judicious use of search terms (ideally, bringing up every fifth page, which you can do by searching on page number) you could probably read most of it online before the "You've searched inside this book too often" limits come up. (I've only seen that message myself for kw's One Taste.) Again, I'm apparently not seeing royalties from it anyway, so it makes no difference to me if you help yourself to that info.... (I still can't believe that those aging hippies were charging me, as the sole investor—a $40,000 [incl. interest] Cdn. mistake, that—a full $75 U.S. per hour for doing simple HTML editing which any competent high-school geek could have done for $10.)

Ponder this, though: If there really is a "reason for everything" in our lives, and if those lives are planned out prior to our births according to any understanding of karma, how can one go from being a "teacher" to an outcaste simply for telling the truth and doing simple, competent research? What does it say about spirituality as a pursuit of truth, when simply following truth to the best of your abilities is the death-knell for all forms of "spirituality"? 'Cause, much as one might still reserve the right to "hope" that everything will all "turn out for the best" in terms of reincarnation, psi phenomena, auras and subtle energies, etc., no one who is even minimally informed about the debunkings which have been done for each of those "documented" claims could daftly "believe" that any of them are true. The most you can rationally do is to hope. (If, rather than clinging to and trying to preserve the few aspects of the integral perspective which haven't yet been shown to be untenable, you would instead build a philosophy only out of ideas and phenomena which are at least likely to be true—paranormality/psi is not—we would have little to disagree about.)

So, much as Wilber and his daft sycophants might like to imagine the contrary, it ain't just an issue of "changes in altitudes, changes in aptitudes," to modify a phrase from Jimmy Buffet.

"Wastin' away again in Kennywilberville...."

P.S. Meyerhoff has also insightfully noted Wilber's naïve political biases—his "stunning lack of political self-awareness"—at the end of his Chapter 5:

While it appears as if the movement from archaic to magical to mythic to egoic-rational is a developmental progression, this is only true if you have already decided that the egoic-rational stage should be the destination point. Wilber's analysis is made to sound like a neutral description of the traits these diverse types of consciousness and associated moralities exhibit, but it's actually, when shorn of its false value-neutrality, an analysis which asks the question: In what ways are previous world views not yet like ours? Or, to phrase it differently, given that we are morally and cognitively superior, what are they lacking and what kinds of changes were required for them to eventually become like us?

Yes, it always comes back to, how can we improve ourselves to be more like him? Which is, of course, the standard tack of "spiritual leaders" everywhere: Only by subverting your ego to theirs can you become "as great as" they are, etc.

Note also the increasingly cult-like nature of Wilber's integral community—the reluctance to question his pontifications, the marginalizing of anyone who does dare to question his edicts, the paranoia which sees even cogent and completely reasonable questioning as an "attack," the presenting of reported psychological abuse by the leaders as being done for your spiritual benefit, and the absence of dialogue with outside perspectives, etc. None of that, though, has been the product of any overwork or explicit coercion of its members, nor has there been an "escalating series of public commitments" required of the members to bind them to the ideology and community, nor is Wilber their "savior," etc. Rather, the mess there has evolved, even against the best intentions of the persons involved (even including, in a skewed sense, the unreliable-from-the-beginning Wilber himself), via simple human nature. It's just a group of people defending their "specialness" and salvation, and the "genius" of their Hero, against other less-special "outsiders." That is, a group setting itself up as being "more integral than thou"—with us on the outside conversely being less integral, and therefore not worth wasting time on, 'cause we'll "never understand anyway."

Of course, it (i.e., how cults start) is not supposed to work that way, without deliberate coercive persuasion or "brainwashing" to close off a community and make people afraid to leave; but it damned well does work like that. Sure, in a sense the members of the integral community were "tricked" into believing a bunch of false ideas from the Master of Bullshit himself. But 98% of them wouldn't have had it any other way. That is, if kw hadn't fed them what they desperately need to hear, with a veneer of science and rationality, they'd have found someone else who would. (I know I'm repeating myself a lot from what I've already posted elsewhere, but every "cult victim" who escapes from a "dangerous cult" to join a "safe, traditional religion" simply proves that point, while simultaneously demonstrating the overwhelming human need to be part of an in-group, particularly if such membership will "save your soul.")

Some competent social psychologist should really take it as a project to study the Wilberian integral community in detail for posterity, recording its descent into a completely closed community, in which doubters are branded as heretics, by whatever name, and good members are made to feel so special for being "integral" or second tier, as opposed to the "axis of non-integrality" outside, that they can't bear to leave the community. For, that departure would equate to an admission of failure in their "most important, prime directive" spiritual quest. Or did you think that the degree of isolation from the "real world," and the "Us vs. Them" mentality of the Integral Emperor and his loyal subjects, wasn't going to get any worse than it already is? It can always get worse....

(It would be intuitively plausible to say that the less sense one's ideas make, the more they must be protected from questioning by competent outsiders. Wilber's ideas make dangerously little sense, and he's been caught, red-handed, fabricating information far too often by now, for anyone of sound mind and body to look past those deceptions/incompetencies as if they were anything less than pandemic in his work. In fact, the only way he'll be able to preserve the "integral edifice" he has worked all his adult/"professional" life to create, against further disintegration, is by completely closing it off from any cogent questioning. So, what do you think he'll be doing, in that regard, over the next few years? What does the dismissal of Meyerhoff's delightfully reasoned work—so well-thought-out, in general, that it goes right over the heads of the vast majority of integral community members—as being "altitudinally challenged" tell you about what the "integral" future holds?)

For that matter, every one of our world's religions and spiritual paths might as well be simply an unwitting, global social psychology experiment gone horrendously awry. They could of course be more than that, in terms of at least a few of their claims regarding states of consciousness and/or paranormality eventually turning out to be valid; but in practical terms they might as well be nothing more.

When I was downtown shopping yesterday evening, happened to walk past the Indigo bookstore at Bay and Bloor, and saw someone just starting to set up amps, etc., for a free show there this afternoon. With Leonard Cohen, and his Norah Jones-like "protege with benefits," Anjani. (Cohen's new Book of Longing is currently the #1 selling book in the country.)

The Barenaked Ladies and Ron Sexsmith opened with a couple of Cohen covers, then Leonard himself came out to introduce Anjani, and later joined her in singing some of the songs from her new album, Blue Alert. Replete, throughout, with religious references such as "saying goodbye at the inner door" and "guru says it's empty, but that doesn't make it light," etc.—which I personally could have done better without; as with Anjani's pranaming to the crowd at the end of her four-song set.

From 1994 to 1999, Leonard was living at a Zen monastery near L.A.—Mount Baldy, of all the names—during which time his manager ripped him off. Too bad he has no idea of how the "enlightenment" he's being offered in Zen is just as bogus.

Still, all in all, a fairly relaxing hour, with just a bit of rain falling at the end.

Fine essay by Frank Visser on "Talking Back to Wilber"—and on how people who dare to openly and cogently question His Integral Highness are treated by the group of sycophants who will not see that their Emperor has no hair ... sorry, I meant to say "has no clothes."

Of course, Wilber has never actually been "brilliant," except in the sense that Velikovsky was brilliant. That is, a brilliant quack, completely out of his depth, but convinced that he's making fundamental contributions to the body of human knowledge. The transpersonal and integral world, however, has never possessed the breadth of knowledge, appropriate skepticism about wild claims, or aptitude in utilizing (or even just recognizing) the scientific method, which are needed to properly call kw out for his many provable incompetencies, misrepresentations, and outright deceptions. (Velikovsky himself was not so "lucky," rather being forced to answer to real scientists for his fantasial view of reality, and predictably coming out looking like the fool he was, for that.)

So, The Shiny One ain't brilliant. Never was. But wrong—yes, that he certainly is. Consistently.

An interesting response to the question of gurus and Spiral Dynamics®, here.

Personally, the only reaction I could consider appropriate, by now, to the question of gurus and spiritual seeking, is to encourage people to not waste their time with any of it. I have no hope left that "genuine gurus" who can actually deliver what they promise exist now or have ever existed, nor do I think that what they've presented as the highest stages of human consciousness would be worth pursuing even if those (e.g., witnessing, or non-dual) phenomena/noumena were ontologically real.

Plus, closed-society in-group dynamics, particularly when combined with promises/expectations of enlightenment/salvation, have a way of reducing both leaders and followers to behaving in the worst pre-rational and conformist ways, regardless of how loftily they may test or behave in "normal" circumstances. (Compare the sadistic/submissive behaviors in the Stanford prison experiment, by persons who only qualified as subjects in the first place for being the most psychologically healthy of the applicants. Or, consider the psychological regression measured by Jane Loevinger in female university students—a "slight but consistent loss" of ego development from their freshman to their senior years. You wouldn't have thought that a person could regress from where they were when they graduated high school, would you?)

Aside from that, I would be extremely wary of quoting Carlos Castaneda on any subject, since he was not merely one of the more blatant (now-debunked) frauds/hoaxers in the "spiritual" world—though taken fully seriously and widely celebrated by people who could not tell the difference—but also one of the cruelest cult leaders of his day, as Amy Wallace has detailed. Quoting such a person complimentarily in the midst of cautions about other "abusive" spiritual leaders could easily give the mistaken impression that he was one of the "good" leaders there. He was not. And, while Castaneda himself may have passed away, numerous "Tensegrity" groups still exist, none of which would be likely to turn away a sincere seeker who was convinced that their teachings and "beneficial discipline" had much to offer.

The same goes for Kimura's credulous regard for Gurdjieff—speaking of him in the same breath as other "authentic masters," without regard for Peter Washington's debunking (in Madame Blavatsky's Baboon) of that "path to enlightenment" and its wantonly abusive leader, about which little good can actually be said. Not to mention that, if you're going to be lambasting other "inauthentic gurus" for not being able to write "coherently good English" (!), as Kimura does, you should be able to do better yourself.

Personally, I found his ruminations to be exactly what I've come to expect from "spiritual experts." Such entirely unimpressive advice, further, could just as easily have come from the mouth of Chögyam Trungpa, albeit presumably with far less sincerity in the case of the latter alcoholic fraud. It's standard spiritual tripe—even with a smattering of "Tibetan Buddhism and the New Physics" thrown in, in Kimura's case. If you disagree, read my own first book before you try to tell me that I'm not in a position to judge.

Speaking of that first book: While Huston Smith and James Fadiman could not say enough good things about it, the response I received from the soporific Dr. Herbert V. Guenther, Ph.D.—quoted as a recognized authority by Kimura—was simply a terse "What you've written has nothing to do with enlightenment." Or words to that effect. Because, you know, if it's not based in archaic Sanskrit and simple-minded phenomenology, it just can't be relevant. At least not to such an ossified old fart as Guenther. (That, however, has not stopped him from sitting, 'til death do they part, on the Board of Editors of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology—who will surely respond any day now to the Wilber vs. Bohm critique I had submitted for review back in November of 2003.)

Maybe one in a thousand guru-figures uses his/her power wisely/non-abusively. But if you're imagining that that means the enlightenment they're chasing (and offering to you) is actually real, you've got a WAY better imagination than I do. Further, for all of Ken Wilber's (for one) glaring personal and professional flaws, if he were to ever set himself up as an explicit guru, he wouldn't even be among the worst 80% as far as narcissism, manipulation, deceit, false claims to (e.g., non-dual) enlightenment, or the psychological or physical abuse of others goes. That's no positive comment on him, of course—the man is utterly dysfunctional, and has been since at least his earliest "professional" days. It's simply that the rest of the guru-realm is filled with such absolutely worthless, abusive, lying shitheads that, by comparison, kw stands out like a wise, compassionate and selfless man, even for all of his professional incompetence and/or outright manipulative dishonesty.

So, if you think (rightly) that kw's books and character aren't worth the paper they're printed on, but still believe that "genuine gurus" exist who can deliver the enlightenment they promise ... well, "good luck with that." You're gonna need it.

In the court system, we have character witnesses to justify our belief that a person is telling the truth, based on his truthfulness and other behaviors in the past.

In the business world, you have references to assure potential employers that you will do the job properly in your new, "untested" capacity, based on your having delivered comparable goods to previous employers.

In the spiritual world, however, even if a "wise" authority figure is consistently wrong or outright dishonest about things which are actually testable, we are still expected to take their word for "things unseen." They first unwittingly prove, time after time, that they cannot or will not do the simplest research to get the most elementary things right; and then they pontificate about the value in learning from ones such as them, that you too may attain to the same exalted realizations of "truth" as they have! Or they first prove, for example, that they cannot tell the difference between normal and ostensibly paranormal phenomena; and then they vouch for the existence of the latter, based on their own experiences! And followers, who themselves won't do the most basic research into how such claims can be tested and invariably found wanting, swallow it all, hook, line and sinker.

Wilber has never been the "worst" among those "leading" damned fools; he's simply the one who makes the most quantitative statements, and thus can be the most easily shown to be consistently wrong/dishonest, via simple research which any competent undergraduate should be able to do.

I was recently apprised of the following article on evolution from the current issue of BioScience, as to the non-integral benefits of "half a wing":

To paraphrase the integral experts: "With a half-philosophy, you are dinner."

Good to see Frank Visser's new Wilber Watch blog.

Not that I, personally, have any interest left in any form of philosophy or spirituality. But that's just me....

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