I don’t pay much attention anymore to the whole Cults ‘n’ Gurus schtick. But every once in awhile, stuff shows up in my inbox. This is one such currently unfolding “blast from the past/present”:
Ungagged: Ex-student Breaks Five Year Enforced Silence:
I was a member of the “inner circle” of Cohen’s students; in fact, I lived in his personal residence for several years, was a member of the EnlightenNext Board of Directors, and was the real estate scout who located and helped arrange the purchase of the 220 acre, nearly three-million-dollar, EnlightenNext “World Headquarters” at Foxhollow, as well as the EnlightenNext Centre in London. I was a student for a total of thirteen-and-a-half years, leaving in 2001….
Under extreme psychological distress and in an emotionally crushed state of mind, in an effort to save myself from what seemed like a form of death-spiral, I decided to offer up all I had at the time, which was a recently received inheritance of $80,000….
What [Cohen later said] in effect was, “You can have your money back, but you must remain, like all my students, in a state of muteness; keep your mouth shut, because I’m not ready to let go of you yet.” His reply to [journalist Yonathan] Levy denying the existence of a gag order, “or for that matter any other court order,” is utterly dishonest and disingenuous….
It must be emphasized that this kind of silencing is the norm at EnlightenNext; no current student would ever venture a public critique, or dare even to utter one privately in the presence of Cohen or a fellow student.
A comment:
Why would Ken Wilbur in any way disassociate himself with Andrew when he fundamentally agrees with him? Do those of you who remember the men’s sauna with all the posted letters and humiliating caricature s of us forget about the enlarged (almost Floor to ceiling) Ken Wilbur letter where Ken himself called us (Andrew’s Formal Men) “whiney Babies.” I believe this letter was in response to a missive Andrew sent to Ken complaining about how hard his life was trying to get us to move in the right direction.
I remember thinking, how the hell does Ken Wilbur know anything about any of this, the sauna, the humiliating “spiritual practices,” how I was asked to make a “man” out of someone by taking them to the large meditation room and “rough them up” & the rest of it. I remember asking myself who is he to call me a “whiney baby”?
It must be nice to have your ivory tower conversations published but I wonder what Ken would think with his head coming out of Laurel Lake for the 999th time chanting “I only got one side of the story.”
As always, though, “Wilbur” was the loveable pig from Charlotte’s Web. Ken “Wilber,” by contrast…. Well, you know what they say: “Never try to reason/wrestle with an integral meditator. You both get dirty, and the integral meditator enjoys it.”
And Brad Warner, on the Integral Life Practice Kit/scam:
[I]t turns out that what you really need to be in the now all the time is to spend $199 (That’s $50 off the regular price, they say. And just where is it selling for that price?) on a special kit containing 5 DVDs, 2 CDs, 3 booklets, a poster and some of what they call “one-minute modules.” Plus, if you act now, you get 7 free gifts (that’s right, 7 free gifts—and this is exactly the way they say it in the ad. They say “7 free gifts” and right afterward in parenthesis it says “that’s right, 7 free gifts.”) I can just hear the voice of Casey Casem yelling all this at me from a TV left tuned on at 3 in the morning.
And you wonder why I hate the whole spiritual master business so much. If people are falling for bullshit as blatant as this… I don’t know. I don’t even want to know!
Warner, BTW, wrote me back in 2005 (after I had sent him a link to the PDF of STG), saying that he enjoyed reading Stripping the Gurus “a lot.”
A comment on that thread:
I was once the head of selling the ILP Kit for a few months at my employment at I-I (I did not write the copy for this sales letter though, although I’ve written some embarrassing copy in my past).
In many ways, my time spent working for Wilber’s organization was the beginnings of my questioning this kind of marketing of the dharma, the selling of spirituality, and the cultural climate that this emerges from. I’m now an enormous critic of this kind of marketing, although I don’t see many alternatives, honestly, in our current culture.
Ironically, the ad for the ILP kit on that website contains a fake testimonial written by someone else, with my name [i.e., Andrew McDuffee] on it. I never felt good about that, but felt pressured to go along with that decision, as it was basically presented to me as already done. There were many things we did at I-I that I didn’t agree with, but the culture was not one of disagreement with the decisions made from on high.
In truth, I find AQAL a theory pretending to be a meta-theory full of lots of garbage and lots of interesting attempts to make sense of a complex and chaotic world. A noble attempt, but I find no refuge in any theories at all. And meaninglessness is something more to be dealt with in terms of spiritual practice and doing things that are personally meaningful than any dogma, creed, or totalistic world philosophy.
The ILP kit as a product I’d rank as a 3/5—not as much of a scam as Holosync, but not as good as a great yoga DVD (of which there are numerous crappy ones, of course).
For those who find Big Mind useful, it is a pretty good DVD. I never found the DVD that great, but lent it to a friend who loved it.
The “3-body workout” is ok for getting some movement and embodiment, but no where to go once you’ve learned the basics, unlike systems of QiGong or Yoga, etc.
The “1-minute modules” I always found to be an exaggeration of a useful concept, that of doing whatever you can during the day to practice, but all take more than 1 minute. I also prefer more focus on long-term commitment over a lifetime, in the likes of the original Integral Transformative Practice of Leonard and Murphy: http://www.itp-life.com/ Wilber stole the acronym ILP at first until they complained.
Murphy and Leonard did multiple years of study with cohorts before publishing their book. Wilber made up some practices one day in a loft meeting (e.g. 3-2-1) and presented them as on golden tablets from God.
3-2-1 is a summary of what psychological work should look like, but isn’t substantial as a technique compared to many existing techniques.
The “mental module” is silly. The only way to learn Wilber’s integral theory is to sit down with a stack of his older, harder books and read them and think about it. And then I’d recommend going and getting a bunch of books on other subjects and read them too so you don’t get stuck in Wilber’s giant head.
That all said, I think it’s a long road to uncovering what’s wrong with this stuff for some of us.
Yes, if only there was some way of doing due diligence about “Wilber’s giant head.” Some way to separate the wheat from the chaff … any way at all, really….
Another comment:
I once tried, through Wilber’s blog, to contact him regarding his malformed expressions on evolutionary biology.
Suffice it to say, I did not get a reply.
On the other hand, I did contact in 2004 what later became the “Big Mind” sangha regarding their affiliation with Frederick Lenz. I blogged about it here.
It does not appear to me that they’re still claiming that “true practice, true ‘enlightenment’ takes years of practice/enlightenment”….
Now if you want to know where the money came from to push “Big Mind” you have your answer: It came from “Zen Master Rama’s estate.
You cannot make this up.
The last word goes to Jody Radzik, of Guruphiliac:
Ken Wilber is the Suzanne Somers of celebrity spirituality scam endorsers.
Not to mention the “Einstein of consciousness research”!
I had no idea Somers wasn’t a natural blonde….
