Blog — November, 2005

Ooh, this sort'a thinkin' ain't gonna make the fundamentalists, Intelligent Design'ers, and Wilberites at all happy. Evo devo. One less reason to buy into K-K-K-Ken's addled claims that Eros is a necessary ingredient in the evolution of the k-k-k-kosmos.

Ken Wilber: Rubber Soul and Revolver, those two albums were recorded in the same sessions.

Rick Rubin: Were they?

KW: Yeah.

RR: I didn't know that.

KW: Yeah. It was for, like, this two-month, intense recording session. And then it was just sort of hacked down the middle in a sense, in terms of how they released them. And that's why they're so extraordinary, and they're very, very different in some ways, but they're very, very similar. You can really see that it was cut from the same cloth, so to speak.

—"Beyond Genre. Part 2. Adventures in Rock and Romance," 9:59 - 10:26.

Uh-huh. Well, the first red flag there should be the fact that Rubber Soul was released in early December of 1965, while Revolver hit record store shelves on August 5, 1966, as the Beatles' seventh album in three years. (The semi-compilation Yesterday And Today was released in between them. Revolver contained three songs—"I'm Only Sleeping," "And Your Bird Can Sing," and "Doctor Robert"—which had already appeared on the U.S. release of Yesterday And Today.) It would have made no sense at all for their money-focused record company, concerned that rock music was just a passing fad, to have left a full studio album from their top-selling group sitting "in the can" for eight months: people get fired for making managerial decisions of that level of stupidity.

And a "two-month, intense recording session"? Not quite. From Wikipedia:

Rubber Soul ... was recorded in just over four weeks to make the Christmas market.

More studio info, regarding Rubber Soul:

• "Nowhere Man" was "recorded on October 21 and 22" [of 1965] (Steve Turner, A Hard Day's Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles' Song, p. 75). "In My Life" was recorded in the same month (Turner, p. 80)

And now, Revolver:

• "The first draft of John's lyric for 'I'm Only Sleeping' [side one, song #3] was scratched on to the back of a letter from the Post Office, dated 25 March 1966" (Turner, p. 90). Late March was, of course, three and a half months after the release of Rubber Soul, making it rather unlikely that the Fab Four had recorded the (non-existent) song during the October 1965 sessions!

• "Paul wrote 'Here, There And Everywhere' [side one, song #5] in June 1966 while sitting by John's outdoor pool" (Turner, p. 92)

• "'For No One' was written in a rented chalet in the Swiss ski report of Klosters, where Paul and Jane Asher spent a brief holiday in March 1966" (Turner, p. 97)

• "[T]he Beatles recorded Revolver in May 1966" (Turner, p. 96)

Two months, eh? Since when is October, 1965, to May/June of 1966 a mere "two months"? Since when is that just one session? (And surely they toured in between the two albums, too.) Since when, Ken? Since when?

(Soon as I find my copy of Mark Lewisohn's The Beatles Recording Sessions I'll be able to pin down a lot more information about the specific dates, above. Turner suitably praises the same excruciatingly detailed book—for which Lewisohn even got access to the original studio tapes, to verify which instruments were added on which takes [e.g., the sitar on take three of "Love You To"]—however. So, it's not going to be a question of their info not agreeing.)

There's a damn good reason, then, why Rubin, even as one of the upper echelon of music producers over the past two decades, had never heard that the songs for Rubber Soul and Revolver were recorded in the same sessions: They weren't. Rather, the claim that they were is just another provable fabrication on the part of the "Pinocchio of consciousness research."

What an idiot. What a total, fucking, bald, integral idiot.

"You want to be a paperback writer"? Only in the fiction section, Ken. You don't deserve to have your books placed anywhere else. (Except maybe in the bathroom, for if they run out of toilet paper.)

No, you can't. When even greater idiots like Blue Dolphin's Paul Clemens genuinely believe that leprechauns are real, and yet are respected members of the Board of Editors of the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, you cannot trust a word without first verifying it from knowledgeable, original sources.

P.S. If the Beatles had actually recorded those two albums in the same sessions in 1965, why wouldn't they have released it all as a double album? (Backing singers: "Why not, Ken?") Why is it that the later album, Revolver, has the first, experimental use of backward tapes, on "Rain"? (Backing singers: "Why, Ken? Why? Oooh!") The clues are all there for anyone who cares to think about it, even without doing any actual research.

Rubber Soul and Revolver, for all their brilliance, were not "cut from the same [studio sessions] cloth." Not even close. If kw can "really see" that they were, that's just another one (or more) of his integral hallucinations.

Music industry über-producer Rick Rubin, "the most important white boy in hip-hop," guested on Ken Wilber's Integral Naked forum in early 2005. In the midst of Wilber's hyenic laugh, we learn nothing we didn't already know about putting together an album. (Yes, Kensho, groups will write and record dozens of songs to keep an album's worth—unless you're Paul Simon and never write a song that doesn't end up on a record. There's nothing new about that. Perhaps because you, kw, seem to put into print every half-baked idea that glances across your integral forehead, drastically lacking any self-editing capability, that surprises you. But it's really not worth getting so childishly excited about. The meditating Weezer has written 700 songs; the members of Genesis wrote 300 even just in their amateur days. That's just how it's done.) We are, however, let in on the joyous news that both RR and KW are in love, and are occasionally wondering about what it would be like to have children. Yada, yada, yada.

For the real information on Rubin's "integral" character, then, one must turn to a less "spiritual" source. Thus, as we learn from Stacy Gueraseva's Def Jam, Inc.: Russell Simmons, Rick Rubin, and the Extraordinary Story of the World's Most Influential Hip-Hop Label:

By his sophomore year, academics had already taken a backseat to Rubin's real interest: music.... Although he missed most of his classes, Rubin still got passing grades. One of the ways he managed to do this way by paying other students, like Ric Menello, to write papers for him (p. 8).

Rubin's elaborate [dorm-room] sound system was a convenience when it came to deejaying Weinstein's parties, but it was a major nuisance for a few of his neighbors. His upstairs neighbor Nancy like to go to bed at around 11 p.m., which was when Rubin's night usually got started. He and his friends would blast their music through the Cerwin-Vega speaker, waking up Nancy almost every night. When she would call Rubin and yell at him or bang on the floor, he only turned the music up louder. "This is what I do! This is my art," he yelled back at her. "He really went out of his way to make her life miserable," [fellow student Mike] Espindle recalled.

The conflict continued for months, and culminated one night in a near-fight. Rubin and his friends had just returned from a show amped and in the mood to party, so they sat around his room, laughing and listening to something really loud. Nancy started banging from above. Rubin increased the volume and, for added effect, started vacuuming the ceiling. Everyone was laughing hysterically, until suddenly the door blasted open, and there stood Nancy. "You motherfuckers!" she yelled, and ran into the room, wielding a small knife, according to Rubin. He made a quick getaway.

As a result of the incident, Rubin was threatened with being kicked out of the dorm. He appeared in the "Weinstein Court" to argue his case. "I am a punk rock musician, and volume is integral to the music," he said in his defense. "To have punk rock without volume is to diminish its artistic value and merit. Therefore, volume is a necessary part of me doing my art." He argued that when he listened to his music, he was studying, just as Nancy studied for her law classes. Rubin enlisted Menello to testify that he had heard few, if any, noise complaints about Rubin during his front-desk shift. "Someone has to have extrasensitive hearing like Superman to think it was too loud!" Menello proclaimed....

Rubin's defense worked. He was allowed to stay in the dorm—under some strict regulations. "I was the first person brought up on charges in the fifteen or twenty years that they had a court," Rubin remembered proudly. His upstairs neighbor Nancy moved soon after (p. 10-1).

In the late '80s, the people at Def Jam applied their collective skills to the world of film, in the movie Tougher Than Leather.

The critics panned it. "Vile, vicious, despicable, stupid, sexist, racist, and horrendously made" was one typical reaction.

The list of offensive content was long. There was Rubin's generous use of the word nigger. "Never thought I'd die on account of a nigger," his character, Vic, says during his death scene. The nudity and violence seemed gratuitous (p. 150).

What I wanna know is this: How is it that someone who was so mono-perspectival at age nineteen as to maliciously disregard the completely reasonable needs (for quiet) of those living around him; who reportedly paid other students to do his academic work for him, and then had those interest-conflicted friends "tell the truth" on his behalf; and whose major-league directorial and acting debut led critics to vehemently dismiss his cinematic work as "stupid," among numerous other much-worse epithets—how is it that someone like that can be on the receiving end of Wilber's overreaching, fawning pontifications for the multi-perspectival, genre-busting "integral art" (of others, with RR as producer) which arises from exactly the same mindset?

Plus, here's kw's take (in One Taste) on his own needs when he's working:

The great romantic composers (Chopin, Mahler) are quintessential 4th chakra, all heart emotion, sometimes drippingly. Haydn, Bach, Mozart, later Beethoven, push into 5th to 6th, music of the spheres, or so it seems to me. You can actually feel your attention gravitate to various bodily centers (gut, heart, head) as these musical types play.

I find whenever I am writing about, say, Plotinus, Eckhart, or Emerson, the only music that doesn't disturb thought is Mozart and the later Beethoven, some of Haydn. But when I'm doing the drudge work of bibliography, footnotes, etc., gimme rock and roll any day.

Hmm. Good thing, then, that Rubin wasn't in the same building when kw needed peace and quiet for his own work, and their respective "multi-perspectival" (ha!) needs conflicted, disturbing kw's "deep thought" (ha!). "Trouble in integral paradise," indeed.

Rubin currently resides in the Hollywood Hills in an imposing estate whose grounds are populated with religious relics, shrines, and a library replete with books on Eastern mysticism, psychology, and Sufi poetry.

Uh-huh. "Been there, done that." Grew out of it. What else?

"What do you listen to?" [Rubin] asked [his college roommate Adam] Dubin during their first conversation. "Led Zeppelin," said Dubin. Rubin frowned. "Rolling Stones," Dubin continued, and Rubin frowned again. He said that he was more excited by current sounds like a hard-core band from San Francisco called Flipper... (Gueraseva, p. 4).

And yet....

It wasn't until record companies found a way of selling hip-hop to a white audience, however, that the phenomenon took off. When producer Rick Rubin found a way of keeping both the original power of the drumming and its swing, he made the Beastie Boys famous. In 1986 the opening track of their album Licensed to Ill, "Rhymin' & Stealin'," did just that, beginning with the unmistakable opening drums [sampled] from [Zeppelin's] "When the Levee Breaks." The song, and the album, turned hip-hop on its head, finally opening up the genre to a massive white audience and creating the bedrock for all subsequent acts that followed in the Beastie Boys' footsteps. The simple fact is that without [drummer John] Bonham and "When the Levee Breaks," there would be no hip-hop as we know it (Andy Fyfe, When the Levee Breaks, p. 131).

Gueraseva was formerly the editor-in-chief of Simmons' magazine, Oneworld—thus looking to minimize the influence of classic rock on the hip-hop genre—while Fyfe is comparably fanatical about Zeppelin, thus wanting to maximize its contribution.

If you read at all in rock music biographies, you will find that Zeppelin "invented heavy metal"; but that Black Sabbath, too, nearly single-handedly invented the same genre. Hell, even the Kinks "invent[ed] heavy metal" (Shearman, The Kinks, p. 34). How? Simply for Dave Davies' use of the heavily (un-musically) distorted guitar sound on "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night" (which licks may or more probably may not have actually been played by Zeppelin/session guitarist Jimmy Page).

You will also find that even Sabbath's music grew out of twelve-bar blues; and that even the same "Sab Four," led by Tony Iommi, experimented with genre-busting horn sections in the latter part of the '70s. (You don't get to a professional level on any instrument without being able to play and compose across a wide range of styles. It's just record companies—and the expectations of fans/audiences—which constrain what's allowed to be released.)

Let's leave the last word on music to Ken Wilber, as he's the (self-appointed) real expert:

[The Beatles' Rubber Soul and Revolver] totally changed the way music was done, it was galvanizing what happened at that point. That's when Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson were in their subtle body duel, which is really a quite extraordinary story ("Beyond Genre, Part II," 10:28+).

No doubt it is. Do tell, Ken. Do tell.

What the hell is he imagining there?

Let's then leave the last word on reality to Rubin:

There's nothing better than telling the truth. It's really about falling in love.

Well, if telling the truth (in music or elsewhere) is like falling in love, then dealing with Wilber's ideas must be at least as good as getting paid to jerk off a grubby stranger in a dark alley. (Rubin should know: One of his former girlfriends was an ex-porn star.)

As the South Park boys sing: "You don't have to spend your life ... giving hand-jobs for cash." You also don't have to waste your time on Wilber's or Rubin's versions of "truth."

Just in time for Christmas, another fairy tale taken as true by people who can understand—barely—that Santa Claus isn't real, but fail to properly apply that idea in practice.

Me, I still haven't given up hope that Ken Wilber may be the reincarnation of Plotinus, and Adi Da the reincarnation of Jesus.

Kidding. Though Da Coronameister did actually claim to be the "Second Coming of Christ."

The 1/9/78 issue of Time magazine (Vol. 111, No. 2, the one with the "another reason to forget the 1970s" cover with "Hollywood's Honchos—Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood") has a story "Animals That Kill Their Young." The article begins:

In his classic work On Aggression, Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz argued that man is the only species that regularly kills its own kind. This concept, which contrasted the order and restraint in the animal world with the chaotic aggressiveness of man, reflected the mood of the time: the shadow-of-the-Bomb pessimism of the '50s and early '60s. But Lorenz was wrong; since 1963, when his book was published, naturalists have identified dozens of species that kill their own, including lions, hippos, bears, wolves, hyenas, herring gulls and more than 15 types of primates other than man.

The Juvenile section of my local public library had the book Cannibal Animals, so I checked it out. The first chapter has the following statement: "Biologists have estimated that there are more than 1300 kinds of cannibal animals—species that eat members of their own kind." Maybe a factoid that can be verified with a more impressive source.

Oh, dear. That leaves more than 1297 types of animals which kill their own kind, but which don't fit into Wilber's confidently uninformed statement (in 2003's Kosmic Consciousness) that "human males, rats, and weasels are the only three animals that kill their own kind."

"Male and female ignoreth he them."

Lorenz's book On Aggression is item #267 in the bibliography for Wilber's (1981) Up from Eden—being a woefully outdated source of information even at that point. Note, though, that even when kw has updated his "expert" knowledge (as of 2003), he's still more than twenty-five years behind anything resembling a competent, current understanding of the field. Children's books, in all seriousness, are better sources of information, being written by authors who are better informed than the "Einstein of consciousness research"!

And so it goes for the "evolutionary arc" (or, in Wilber's semi-creationist case, the evolutionary "ark").

Another fine essay by Jim Andrews: Twenty Boomeritis Blunders: Shoddy Scholarship, Salacious Sex, and Sham Spirituality. As he notes:

After reviewing Visser's list of "Core Concepts", I've just now realized how meager kw's original contributions are! Geez Louise, I worked hard to generate 20 blunders to mock his list of 20 Tenets, but now I learn that Visser says he had only 19!?! Maybe that's a big difference between us: when kw promises 20 tenets, he delivers only 19, but when I promise 20 blunders, I deliver 21!

Fine, fine essay. I only wish I had written it.

A polite and earnest request for an overview would be one thing. But you, O Rick'o, first insult my work, and then expect me to put forth extra effort just to make your life easier, when you won't even make the minimal effort to inform yourself first? That's pathetic to the point of dysfunctionality. READ THE FUCKING CHAPTER (and the Appendix, and this blog)! That Appendix (on Wilber vs. Bohm), incidentally, has been categorized by at least one Ph.D. who is in a damned good position to know as being "brilliant and deeply insightful." Perhaps he really meant to say that it was "gossipy and full of semantic bullshitting," but what he actually said was the former. Go figure.

I was looking back over that "Norman Einstein" chapter a few days ago, and came across the following observation, written by myself in the early part of this year:

Likewise, the failure of subtle energies and bodies to show themselves in properly conducted tests leaves one with very little to be confident about in the transpersonal levels of Wilber's objective and interobjective quadrants. That is so, even in the unlikely event that he has accurately represented others' research, there.

Boy, did I call that one! Indeed, as this blog has shown in extreme detail, Wilber makes exactly the same mistakes, and fabricates exactly the same quantity of data, in the core aspects of his "theories" as he does in supposedly ancillary subjects such as Bohmian physics and evolutionary biology. (He may or may not understand the latter subject in which he has post-graduate training, but he is provably incompetent in the former, and has been since the late '70s.)

Can I summarize that, too, for the benefit of helpless dopes like Tricky Rick who can't be bothered to Read The Fucking Manual? No, I cannot. I have roughly 1001 better things to do.

Be honest, Rick: You're the type who calls in to helpdesk whenever you can't figure something out right away, expecting them to do extra work to help you get the simplest things right, aren't you?

"Hey, you jerks sold me a defective computer!" ("What seems to be the problem, sir"?) "Well, at first glance, there's a coffee-cup holder where the CD drive should be!" ("Well, sir, on page three in the manual ...") "... I didn't read up to that point; the first couple of pages looked like a bunch of gossip and semantic bullshitting to me. So what about my computer?! I want a refund!!"

I am not your "helpdesk mommy," Rick. It is neither my job nor my mission in life to spoon-feed the likes of you (for free!) with small enough pieces of information that you don't gag and spit them up all over your intellectual high chair.

Are you an MBA or other PHB (pointy-haired boss, from the Dilbert cartoons) manager, by any chance? The need for summaries of work done by other people which you couldn't execute if your life depended on it would make sense, then. Ever heard of being proactive and sourcing the information out yourself, rather than quickly coming to high-level, knee-jerk, hare-brained conclusions and then passively depending on others to do the real work for you?

That's another reason for me to suspect the Zen-like stink of inept management on Rick: His time is too valuable to waste even reading about the details himself, but if I do that work for him at a level which he can digest, he'll "flatteringly" deign to read it. Dumb fuck. And if I were to do that work, what would be the best possible outcome? Yes, that he would do what he should have done in the first place: RTFM.

If you're not an inept manager, Rick, you've truly missed your calling.

I could summarize everything I've ever written about Wilber. But it would make no difference. 'Cause anyone who could read through the first quarter or third (or whatever) of the "Norman Einstein" chapter and come away with nothing more than Rick has, topped with a need for spoon-feeding, will never figure it out, regardless of how high-level the presentation is.

Plus, if you can't get the details right, you won't be able to get the big picture right, either: details are just the "big picture" of an even more microscopic view, while the current "big picture" is itself just a detail in a much broader context. (Think of fractals.) It's just a question of scale; and if you can't get it right at one scale, you won't get it right at another, either. Few people demonstrate that so quantitatively as does the Great Wilber Himself.

What other book, what other reader, would glance through part of a chapter, and then self-importantly contact the author, insult him, and yet expect him to provide a summary of the rest of it?!! Fucking unbelievable. Rick: What planet are you from?

If you reduce any attempt to properly analyze the words used in presenting ideas to mere "semantic bullshit," you will have no basis on which to separate true claims from false ones. If you regard direct quotations from first-person, written accounts (e.g., from de Quincey), or the attempt to apply found patterns of behavior in one area of a person's life to other areas, as being mere "gossip," you may abandon any hope of ever understanding others' motivations.

Do both of those, and you'll fit quite nicely into the integral community. Rick, at least, will welcome you with open arms, for having found a true "kindred spirit" who sees things just as clearly as he does. Clear as integral mud.

Hey, Sweden has just lifted the endangered species protection from its version of the Loch Ness monster.

First ABBA's greatest hits, now this. Those Nordic blondes are on a roll....

Oh. My. God. What in the name of Wilber World is this??! And with Adi Duh's old friend Terry Patten, no less.

How much would you expect to pay to learn "How to become more like Ken Wilber"?

Act now, and for a list price of only $249 you too can proudly not have a fucking clue about anything, and be viewed as an "Einstein" for that by people who don't want to know the difference.

KW dispenses a big, stinky, steaming pile of zoological misinformation (and misandry) in Kosmic Consciousness, CD 5 Track 3, at 4:39:

[T]estosterone is one component of a dickhead, kick-ass attitude that we all know and love as the human male. And it's also human males, rats, and weasels are the only three animals that kill their own kind. So I think that sort of says something as well.

Not so fast (and loose) Kenny. A chapter ("The Plausibility of Adaptations for Homicide," by Joshua D. Duntley and David M. Buss) in a scholarly book on human consciousness, The Innate Mind: Structure And Contents (Oxford University Press, 2005), lists:

• Female sexual cannibalism in insects (mantids, black widow spiders, jumping spiders, and scorpions).

• Killing of the offspring of rival males in mammals (lions, wolves, hyenas, cougars, and cheetahs).

• Intraspecies infanticide in primates (langur monkeys, red howler monkeys, mountain gorillas, chimpanzees, and others).

• "The killing of rival, adult males has also been well documented among mountain gorillas ... and the chimpanzees of Gombe ..., two of our closest genetic relatives."

More about animal cannibalism:

• "The term cannibalism is also used in zoology to describe species who prey upon their own kind, such as lions, crabs, ants, and some kinds of fish." (The Columbia Encyclopedia)

• "In zoology, the eating of any animal by another member of the same species. Certain ants regularly consume injured immatures and, when food is scarce, eat healthy immatures; this practice allows the adults to survive the food shortage and live to breed again. Male lions taking over a pride may kill and eat the existing young. After losing her cubs the mother will become impregnated by the new dominant male, thereby ensuring his genetic contribution. Aquarium guppies sometimes regulate their population size by eating most of their young." (Encyclopedia Britannica)

• Heck, there's even a kiddie book (for those budding integral scholars ages 10 to 12) on this subject! Cannibal Animals: Animals That Eat Their Own Kind by Anthony D. Fredericks.

Yes, but apart from rats, weasels, guppies, lions, crabs, ants, fish, mantids, black widow spiders, jumping spiders, scorpions, wolves, hyenas, cougars, cheetahs, langur monkeys, red howler monkeys, mountain gorillas and chimpanzees ... it's pretty much down to deluded, bumbling integral males behaving like untrustworthy dickheads.

"So I think that sort of says something as well."

It really does, doesn't it?

Of course, Wilber's been under the delusion that only the human species kills each other (in war, etc.) since his Up from Eden days. Jane Goodall's well-known work, obviously, has yet to be accepted in the integral community, in their dedicated and comprehensive "search for truth." Three decades later, and it's still news to them that the chimps Goodall was studying fought a documented war!

Where, oh where, does kw get his vast quantities of (mis)information from? Is he really just making it all up as he goes along?

It would appear so.

P.S. Didn't we all learn that the female praying mantis (i.e., of the "mantids" above) cannibalizes the male after sex, in high-school biology? You know, in that subject that you're supposed to take before you go on to do a fucking Ph.D. (minus thesis) in biochemistry?!!

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