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Richard Feynman reveals a very intriguing story about how a clock that he had given his wife stopped at the moment of her death. On the surface of it, the story has a twilight zone feeling. What an odd coincidence it was. A young woman dies and the clock "mysteriously" stops.

Now for some people this event would provide a point of meaning in which they would impute a certain type of significance (maybe this was a sign to us, maybe a confirmation, maybe a prophecy).

But for Richard Feynman, the soon to be world famous Nobel Prize winner in Physics for his work on Q.E.D., he saw nothing of the sort. Instead of looking for "meaning" in the odd event, he looked for an explanation.

He didn't have to look far. Feynman realized that the attending nurse had touched the clock at the moment of his wife's death to confirm the time of her death. Her simple touch was sufficient to "stop" the clock. Why? Because as Feynman points out, the clock had already been mechanically failing from time to time.

Thus to his mind, nothing paranormal transpired, nothing extraordinary. Rather, a simple physical malfunction occurred.

To his credit, he accepted it as such.

Now something a bit similar happened with Ken Wilber the night his beloved and wonderful wife, Treya, died. As he reports in his moving book, Grace and Grit, powerful winds began to whip up right around the time of Treya's departure. So significant were these winds that Wilber reports that even the newspapers reported it the next day.

Wilber admits that it may have just been a coincidence, but he goes on at length about it. Why? Because ... Wilber finds meaning in the fact that winds kicked up at a most unexpected time.

Now Wilber's narrative, as romantic and moving as it is, shows a clear proclivity to find synchronicity ("meaningful coincidence") in apparently disparate events.

Whereas Feynman's narrative, as romantic and moving as it is, shows a clear proclivity to find common-sense explanations in apparently disparate events.

In the terminology I have been using in this series, Wilber is looking for a Context to the odd occurrences surrounding his wife's death, whereas Feynman is looking for the Pretext to the odd occurrences surrounding his wife's death. Both invoke strategies of interpretation; both assume a priori world views.

Wilber's writing is inflationary and exaggerated to suggest the mystical; Feynman's is deflationary and understated to suggest the physical.

I draw a parallel between these two stories because I think it presents a clear picture about the stark differences between a transpersonal worldview and a merely empirical one.

My hunch is that Feynman's approach is the more mature—he is willing to accept things as they are, more or less—whereas Wilber's view is more immature—he is less willing to take things at a surface level (why else imply that winds carried more significance than they actually did?). What this further suggests is that we are meaning-seeking creatures and we are bound to find meaning or the lack of it in everything we encounter.

What troubles me about Wilber's approach is not his quest for purpose, but his buttressing that quest with questionable and doubtful elements. To use Wilber's own parlance, I find that he commits more pre/trans fallacies in his writing and in his methodologies than he might suspect. In trying to posit a "trans" or "mystical" event he relies on "mythic" or "magical" means, forgetting in the process that a rational inspection would most likely collapse the supposed "rupture" of the divine and show it to be nothing more than a chance occurrence.

In other words, Feynman wouldn't look for the "mysticism" of the winds; he would instead look for the "physics" of the phenomena. And in so doing discover a perfectly rational explanation for what transpired in Boulder, CO.

Naturally, we are free to find meaning and purpose in anything we choose. But in light of Wilber's insistence on a spectrum approach (and his strident criticism of hierarchical negligence among New Agers) I find his lack of skepticism worrisome.

If there really is something beyond the rational mind, if there really is a psychic domain, then we are better served by the likes of Feynman—who was reluctant to project "transrationality" to that which could easily be explained more simply—than we are with Wilber, whose tendency for hyperbole dilutes whatever edge he claims to have.

The reader may think that Grace and Grit is filled with romance and I would heartily agree. But I find its mystical posturings to be exactly that and not indicative of what Wilber would have us believe: a reflection of the subtle realms.

Feynman's story is also quite romantic, but its romance is not hinged upon doubtful variables. One turns to Feynman more and more and finds reliable answers, even though he proclaims nothing supra-ordinary. Turning to Wilber more and more and one finds increasing questions, even though he alleges to provide a transcendental context.

Wilber may turn out to be right, but if his fanciful details are any indication then we will have a long time to find out.

Feynman was not so concerned with being right, as he was with being accurate.

That accuracy has already proven fruitful.

Postscript: Probably the best critique of imputing meaning to disparate events is what is called Littlewood's Law. Here are a few pertinent quotes and they directly serve as counter-ballast to Wilber's transpersonal hyperbole:

If there are thousands, nay millions, of events in our lives (measured in transparently fractal ways), then it should be expected that for every thousand events, there should be two or more events which INTERSECT..... NOTICE that intersection and you will be aware of a MEANINGFUL coincidence..... the meaning being that two disparate parts have something in common (whatever that intersection may entail)."

Freeman Dyson tells it like this:

Littlewood's Law of Miracles states that in the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month. Broch tells stories of some amazing coincidences that happened to him and his friends, all of them easily explained as consequences of Littlewood's Law....

I can even branch off from this and make a broad, sweeping generalization.

There are those who LOOK OR SEEK out these Littlewood EFFECTS/Laws and those who do not.

I would imagine that some are MORE ATTENTUATED or keenly aware of the intersections (which happen randomly) and they will end up seeing MORE MEANING in their lives, even if the meaning quota is the same relatively speaking for all. In other words, there are those who seek the Littlewood stream and plunge right in and those who do not. Blind typing by the way will produce a legible word by chance.

Here is another quote:

Succinctly put, the law of truly large numbers states: With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen. The point is that truly rare events, say events that occur only once in a million [as the mathematician Littlewoood (1953) required for an event to be surprising] are bound to be plentiful in a population of 250 million people. If a coincidence occurs to one person in a million each day, then we expect 250 occurences a day and close to 100,000 such occurences a year.

Going from year to a lifetime and from the population of the United States to that of the world (5 billion at this writing), we can be absolutely sure that we will see incredibly remarkable events. When such events occur, they are often noted and recorded. If they happen to us or someone we know, it is hard to escape that spooky feeling."

Original text at: http://members.tripod.com/~dlane5/joep.html

The reason I compared the two stories between Feynman and Wilber was to point out how a transpersonalist, as in Wilber's case, attempts to explain an unusual event, and how, in turn, as in Feynman's case, a skeptic responds to such an event.

The "maturity" issue can be used by simply employing Wilber's hierarchical schema. According to Wilber, something is "higher" when it is more inclusive and ascends higher up in consciousness (from mythic to rational to subtle, etc.). Something is "lower" (remember these are Wilber's terms) when something is less inclusive and descends down in terms of awareness.

Wilber's response to "winds" is hyped (read the narrative as it originally appeared in New Age Magazine and also read Grace and Grit) according to his own Pre/Trans critiques of others who indulge in the same hierarchy collapse.

One example: it is narcissistic to believe that such winds kicked up as a response to one person's death. Why? Because those very winds also affected many other people and other creatures. The winds were not a merely subjective phenomena, but were rather the long result of physical forces that have long term effects on the local area (think of Chaos or complexity and you will see why this one event cannot be singularly extrapolated and isolated—the winds involve much more than just "blowing").

Thus, according to Wilber's own thoughts (read, for instance, how he critiques New Agers for their short-sightedness on "cancer" and "healing"), his naïvety is merely reflective of mythic and not rational thinking.

Even according to Wilber's ideas, Feynman (and not Wilber) was operating with the rational realm when he tried to look for a non-magical and a non-mythic explanation for the clock stopping at the time of his wife's death. Wilber did no such thing. Feynman was engaging in the rational mind, according to Wilber's own hierarchical structure of consciousness. Thus, Feynman's approach is the more "mature"—not on my definition mind you, but on Wilber's model.

Wilber's inflationary hype is simply reflective of mythic and magical thinking. That's okay, but it's not rational and if Wilber were to critique his own episode he would see it (via his spectrum psychology paradigm) as being "immature" (less inclusive, less rational, etc.).

On the question of reliability [we] don't want to appeal to authority or tradition on these matters. What I meant by more reliable is actually the opposite: more testable, more more empirical, and more accurate. Remember Q.E.[D]. [Quantum Electrodynamics, to which Feynman made fundamental contributions] is perhaps the most "reliable" (in terms of minute accuracy) theory we have to date.

When I compared and contrasted Feynman story surrounding his wife's death and Wilber's story surrounding his wife's death, it was to illustrate how a skeptic and how a transpersonalist responds to an unusual (but not transpersonal) event.

We noticed, for instance, that there was a simple (rational) explanation for why the clock stopped at exactly the time Feynman's wife expired (the nurse checked the clock at that time and the clock had a history of mechanical malfunctioning).

There was nothing "transpersonal" about the event, even though on the surface it "appeared" to suggest something spooky or paranormal. Given Feynman's skepticism, he did not even attempt to "inflate" the story (and by this I mean the tendency not to look for an underlying simpler reason, but to rather "add" or "embellish" the narrative with that which is not readily apparent).

Now a close reading of Wilber's story suggests that he was not so willing, as Feynman, to explain an unusual event—in this case kicked up winds in Boulder—in a simpler and more rational way. [GF note: Lane's reading here is of course bolstered by Wilber's later inclusion of the "weird weather phenomena" attending the death of the wife of one of his readers.] If Wilber really does think they were indicative of some trans-rational force, then he needs naturally to give us some convincing documentation why. Keep in mind that a trans-rational or para-normal event by its very nature is not anti-rational, but rather—using Wilber's terms here—supra rational. It includes rationality and does not exclude it. In more precise terms, a trans-rational event, if it is such, will carry "more" (not less) proof than an ordinary empirical occurrence, provided that such an event manifested outwardly (winds or stopped clocks, for instance).

If there really was something "trans" personal going on in the event, then Wilber should present overwhelming evidence for it. He doesn't.

In Wilber's own critiques of the New Age, he has stated that "New Agers have a tendency to bypass that obstruction known as their brain because they want to go directly to the heart" [paraphrase].

Likewise, in this narrative of the winds, Wilber has provided a beautiful and moving "emotional" portrait (in his schema, magical and mythical, but pre-rational), but he has not provided substantial empirical or causal reasons (the brain?) and has in so doing bypassed the very medium he feels grounds all transpersonal allegations. He has, to use Wilber's parlance, attempted to pass the merely ordinary off as something extraordinary without giving the reader ample evidence.

It was for this reason that I argued for a pre/rational schema, not because there cannot be something beyond the brain but because Wilber's narrative gives us no evidence for it. As such, then, it is a story easily explained (via intertheoretic reduction) by mere coincidence.

Thus when I said Wilber was being narcissistic in his analysis of those winds, I was using the very adjective that Wilber himself on several occasions has used to illustrate a pre/trans fallacy, a mistake where the New Ager or whomever in question sees something mystical when it was merely mythic, where someone sees something paranormal when it was merely normal.

Occam's Razor does not suggest that only simple things exist, but that we should tend first (not last) to the simpler explanation if it explains the given phenomena.

Wilber has a tendency not to look for a simpler explanation, even though he is the very person who argues for doing so.

I don't begrudge Wilber for eulogizing his late wife. I simply call into question the inflationary tendency of his account.

Concerning the significance of the winds, it was Wilber who pointed to it. He was imputing objective meaning in a causal way to those winds, suggesting that they kicked up as a response the passing away of his beloved Treya. That's fine for Ken to do such, but it does not in any way (given his model) provide us with over-riding supra-rational reasons to believe that something truly mystical was going on. The skeptical reader can easily find the explanation, and as such illustrates a merely rational and empirical explanation and not as Wilber's tries to suggest that a Divine Hierophany manifested.

The "narcissism" of the account (to go back to Wilber's own adjective for those who do not seek genuinely rational explanations when such are available) is directly correlated to the fact that those "outer" winds affected many people, some who had no relationship whatsoever with Treya or Ken. In other words, those winds can be subjectively interpreted any way one wishes, but the objective fact of them has a rational basis. If Wilber, as his narrative suggests, really thinks that those "objective" winds (we are not talking about his feelings here) are the result of a Divine intervention, then he has failed to provide overwhelming evidence for it.

Again, a simple explanation is all that is necessary, just as in Feynman's clock story.

There may be something beyond the rational mind, but according to Wilber if there is it will have more proof for it than anything pre-rational. He has not given us that. He has, instead, given us emotional and magical extensions.

Hence, I do not see Wilber has being "more" mature or going beyond the rational mind in his re-telling of the winds. Rather, I see him doing precisely what he criticizes New Agers for doing: "In trying to go directly to the heart, they bypass the Brain." Or, in Wilber's vocabulary, in trying to give meaning to an odd empirical event, he forgets his empiricism and mistakes something pre for something trans, he mistakes something emotional for something subtle.

He mistakes coincidence for Divine intervention. And according to Wilber such mistakes are the trading cards of immature thinkers.