Blog — August, 2005

This, I think, is brilliant. (Any religion where heaven is depicted as having a stripper factory and a beer volcano can't be all bad.)

And keep in mind: The completely discredited "experts" (Michael Behe, etc.) whom the Intelligent Design'ers look to for support of their half-baked notions, are exactly the same ones that Ken Wilber daftly thinks support his Eros-based view of the evolution of the "kosmos."

We may not be in Kansas anymore, Dorothy ... but Boulder is, sadly, not far behind, in its fairly worthless "integral, cutting-edge" theorizings.

In each of the following four quotations kw asserts that, for the average human being, very little personal growth occurs between the ages of 25 and 55, and in the final two quotations, he appears to cite the book Geeks and Geezers to support this contention:

[I]n the average adult human being, roughly ages 25 to 55, there's just no growth at all. It's just very hard. There are exceptions, but for the average person, there's just not much vertical growth going on. (Kosmic Consciousness, CD #7 track 4)

From age 25 to around 55, very few vertical transformations occur. There are some exceptions, which we will discuss later, but they are indeed exceptions. We have a great deal of research on this. Tests measuring cognitive, moral, interpersonal, and self development have been given to adults doing all sorts of things that claimed to be transformative, and basically no vertical development whatsoever occurred. It's almost impossible to get an adult human being to transform. (Boomeritis, p. 393)

But let me put this in a more positive light. What this means is that it is much easier to transform when you are a young adult and when you are an old adult. There's a type of U-curve here, with lots of transformation occurring earlier and later, but few in the middle years. Warren Bennis, who is a valued member of [Integral Center], refers to this phenomena as "geeks and geezers." (Boomeritis, p. 394, with no supporting evidence provided even in the online Endnotes)

So the coming groups that will have a significant portion of their population at second tier are going to be aging boomers and the upcoming kids. What my friend Warren Bennis calls "geeks and geezers." ("Shambhala Interview with Ken Wilber")

Here is a brief summary of the book Geeks and Geezers: How Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders by Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas (Harvard Business School Press, 2002) from the publisher's website:

Geeks and Geezers is a book that will forever change how we view not just leadership—but the very way we learn and ultimately live our lives. It presents for the first time a compelling new model that predicts who is likely to become—and remain—a leader, and why. Today's young leaders grew up in the glow of television and computers; the leaders of their grandparents' generation in the shadow of the Depression and World War II. In a groundbreaking study of these two disparate groups—affectionately labeled "geeks" and "geezers"—legendary leadership expert Warren Bennis and leadership consultant Robert Thomas set out to find out how era and values shape those who lead. What they discovered was something far more profound: the powerful process through which leaders of any era emerge. At the heart of this model are what the authors call "crucibles"—utterly transforming [which doesn't automatically mean psychological stage-growth, Kenny!] periods of testing from which one can emerge either hopelessly broken or powerfully emboldened to learn and to lead. Whether losing an election or burying a child, learning from a mentor or mastering a martial art, crucibles are turning points: defining events that force us to decide who we are and what we are capable of. Through the candid and often deeply moving crucibles of pioneering journalist Mike Wallace to new economy entrepreneur Michael Klein, from New York Stock Exchange trailblazer Muriel Siebert to environmental crusader Tara Church, Geeks and Geezers illustrates the stunning metamorphoses of true leaders.

The book presents a new model of leadership that the authors formulated after interviewing 25 of today's oldest leaders and 18 of today's youngest leaders:

• Geezers: age > 70, born ~1925, formative period 1945 – 1954 (Era of Limits)
• Geeks: age < 35, born ~1975, formative period 1991 – 2000 (Era of Options)

The leadership model, as the subtitle indicates, asserts that the historical era, the values of that era [not value memes!], and personal defining moments (called "crucibles") shape leaders. Bennis and Thomas also identify adaptive capacity ("the ability to process new experiences, to find their meaning and to integrate them into one's life") as "the signature skill of leaders, and indeed, of anyone who finds ways to live fully and well."

This book proposed a new model of leadership that is based on a cross-generational study. It provides absolutely no supporting evidence for kw's claims that, for the average human being, there is a latency/dormancy period between ages 25 and 55.

Of course, it's always possible that the real (or imaginary) Warren Bennis has had conversations with the real (and deluded) Ken Wilber, independent of the content of that book, and caved to the latter's point of view with regard to psychological stage-growth transformations generally only happening in youth and past middle age. Indeed, Bennis could hardly openly disagree with The Shiny One on any major points of integral philosophy and still remain a member in good standing of the integral community. (As it stands, Bennis is actually a founding member of the Integral Institute.)

It's also completely possible that Wilber merely glanced at a title ("Geeks and Geezers") and a subtitle ("How Era, Values [cf. value memes], and Defining Moments Shape Leaders"), "intuitively divined" that the book supports his own integral notions, and ran with it from there.

If the latter suggestion sounds unlikely to you, you have not yet properly appreciated just how much of Wilber's life's work is simply made up by him as he goes along—demonstrably pulled out of thin air, with no factual referent. You can find all the proof you need of that in my "Norman Einstein" chapter, my deconstruction of kw's misrepresentations of David Bohm's ideas, in Jim Andrews' fine essay, and in many previous blog entries, here.

Either way, the book Geeks and Geezers has nothing to do with psychological stage-growth. If the real Bennis has used the phrase "geeks and geezers" in some other context where it actually supports Wilber's conjectures, that's certainly not being advertised. And you'd think kw would advertise that point if it existed at all, wouldn't you?

Ken Wilber: Geek, or (fifty-something) Integral Geezer? You decide.

Hey, this is interesting:

Superman was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster not as a hero, but as a villain. Their short story "The Reign of the Superman" concerned a bald-headed villain bent on dominating the world.

Remind you of anyone?

If only he'd learn to use his integral powers for good, rather than for evil....

I just remembered another amazing claim from the Most Right Reverend Ken of the Church of Integralanity in Boomeritis. On page 411, Carla Fuentes is discussing Integral Transformative Practice:

So let us start with the physical. This can be very simple—perhaps adopting a healthier diet. Or taking up exercise—we recommend weight lifting [!] because its physiological benefits are far greater than any others; but it can also be swimming, jogging, hatha yoga, and so on. We find clinically that about 50% of the changes that occur in transformation actually occur at this simple physical level, so don't pooh-pooh it!

What an amazing assertion: "...about 50% of the changes that occur in transformation actually occur at this simple physical level." Where did that come from?!? [KW, as usual, cites no supporting evidence.] If her claims were true, wouldn't vegetarians/vegans, professional and amateur athletes, joggers, body builders [kw himself excepted], etc. be among the most highly evolved humans on the planet?

Here's another absolutely astonishing gem from Boomeritis. On page 396, KW has "Charles Morin" assert the following:

Studies [not cited by kw] show that yellow [level seven] is approximately ten times more efficient than green [level six]....

[I]f 10% of the population is at yellow, it will very likely be at least as effective as 25% at green....

10% of elderly, wealthy, yellow Boomers will have at least the impact that the 25% of young green Boomers did....

I freely admit that I'm not an acclaimed integral scholar who purports to be developing a new branch of mathematics, but it seems to me KW made a big goof in basic math. If 10% of the population is at yellow, and if yellow is approximately ten times more efficient than green, then the 10% of the population at yellow would be approximately four times as effective, not merely at least as effective, as the 25% of the population at green [10 * 10%/25% = 4], right?

Further, if KW's presumption that Y = 10G were correct, then the current 2% at Y would already be almost as effective as the 25% at G. That seems to me to be just nutty: G dominates the culture (especially academia), and Y hardly makes a peep.

Oops!

KW "giveth with one hand, and taketh away with the other": Minimal comparison of his grand "theories" against reality shows that things don't work at all, in practice, the way he imagines they should! (By his own testimony, it's the "greens" who hold far more sway over "politically correct" academia than the yellow-and-above, second-tier bastards such as himself. That position goes back at least to the early nineties, as kw indicates in the Preface to his Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. There, he relates that his attempted writing of a "textbook of psychology" [God help us] was cramped by the fact that the words "development, hierarchy, transcendental [and] universal" were "no longer allowed in academic discourse," owing to the "extreme postmodernism," "pluralistic relativism," and [green-meme] anti-hierarchy attitudes which had spread through academia. He hadn't discovered Spiral Dynamics® yet, at that point; if he had, he surely would have gotten a head start on his unfounded "Mean Green Meme" fixation, there.) He sabotages himself so inadvertently, and so completely without awareness of what he's doing, it's actually scary.

Again: If 2% of the North American population is currently at yellow, and 20% to 25% (Wilber's own numbers) is currently at green, and if yellow is "ten times more efficient" than green, then Y and G should be nearly of equal strength [20 vs. 20-to-25, from ballpark figures to begin with] right now, in terms of their influence on our culture. Yet, no one in his right mind would assert that they actually are, in practice, of equal influence today.

Of course, knowing Wilber and his transpersonal/integral ilk, when theory doesn't match reality, it's reality that has to go....

One further hopes that, among the "50% of the changes that occur in transformation [at] this simple physical level," Wilber is not including Ramakrishna's claim that his spine lengthened by "nearly an inch" during his Hanuman (monkey god) sadhana. (KW's daft friend Michael Murphy, co-founder of the Esalen Institute, has no doubt whatsoever that Ramakrishna's spine actually did lengthen. He also, however, believes that Chicago bellhop Ted Serios could imprint his thoughts onto film, back in the day. He is also a member of the Board of Editors of The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. Yikes.)

If you believe any of those ridiculous transpersonal claims, I've got some integral-land in Boulder I'd like to sell you.

Of course, you'd have to enjoy living next door to a bunch of "morins" (sp)....

I had added the following links yesterday to the (absurdly one-sided and hagiographic) Wikipedia entry for Saint Ken Wilber:

* [http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/blog/wilberBaffle.asp Ken Wilber on Meditation: A Baffling Babbling of Unending Nonsense]
* [http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/books/LaneMenu.asp David Lane's 1996 critique of Wilber's work]
* [http://www.strippingthegurus.com/stgsamplechapters/wilber.asp Norman Einstein - the collected personal and professional foibles of kw]
* [http://www.strippingthegurus.com/stgsamplechapters/appendix.asp Wilber and Bohm: An Analysis of the Problems with Ken Wilber's "Refutations" of David Bohm's Ideas]

Today, those links have been removed, with the dubious comment by the Wiki user that he was "removing some attack links." (Note: They were simply links to uncomplimentary, external pages, not skeptical content added to the Wiki page itself. And under the completely appropriate "Critiques and dismissals" section, no less!)

For Findhorn, Richard Baker, Meher Baba, and many others, he couldn't dismiss it as an "attack," so he instead performed the public service which he calls "removing self-promotional link." How sweet.

(Those are all links to free information on the Internet. And he doesn't even know that it was me that put them there! All that's given to identify the user who added the information is the IP address of his/her computer! So how can he call it "self-promotional"? What a beautiful example of "democratic censorship"! Granted, it's unlikely that anyone else but me would have placed all of those relevant links to my own free online content there; but you never know, and you certainly don't know enough there to go whole-hog on the censorship thing.)

What he (and several other comparable fools) have done, in fact, is to systematically go down the entire list of the three dozen or so edits I made yesterday, and remove every one of them.

And who is it, most of all, who is so afraid of a few facts that even David Lane's solid critique, from 1996, seems to him to be an "attack," and for whom my giving away of two years of research is merely "self-promotional"? None other than Goethean, founder of the "Freedom of religion" (irony!) WikiProject, who quotes on his Wikipedia user page:

Neutrality is all about presenting competing versions of what the facts are. It doesn't matter at all how convinced you are that your facts are the facts. If a significant number of other interested parties disagrees with you, the neutrality policy dictates that the discussion be recast as a fair presentation of the dispute between the parties.

But that's just so much integral chin music, isn't it?

I assume that this is the same blogging Goethean who considers me to be an "untrustworthy asshole," simply for my casting of completely valid doubt on the competence of his Bald Integral Hero.

All of that, though, is exactly how cults protect their leaders. Always. And dismissing reasonable questioning and debunking as "attacks" is the oldest trick in the book.

Anyone can edit any entry on Wikipedia, via the "edit" links on the subject page.

Anyone can also delete anything.

Goethean claims to want "neutrality in Wikipedia articles that have to do with religion and spirituality." Well, skepticism isn't neutral. Yet it's the only way to see through the bullshit. (And incidentally, the links to Christopher Cowan's two Wilber-debunking articles which I added yesterday at exactly the same time are no more "neutral" than is my own position; not one iota. Yet the little editing tyrant, Goethean, allowed them to remain on the kw page. Go figure. Guess he just doesn't like me, huh?)

Clueless little integral, ass-licking moron. With people like him being administrators in Wikipedia, fuck that as a reliable (i.e., "both sides") source of information.

The admin of the Vivekananda entry has maybe even done Goethean one better, though. For, in explaining why he had deleted the link to my chapter there, he averred:

Reasons being: The article quotes from book by Sil, already included in list of books

Swami Vivekananda: A Reassessment by Narasingha P. Sil ISBN 0945636970

[Er, yeah. The article also quotes from many other books; since when is any of that relevant for the inclusion of information in an encyclopedia entry? (Bibliographies, anyone? Or, if you just include a bibliography, does that mean you don't even need to write the article?!) And the only reason why the reference to Sil's book exists at all on that page is because I put it there! So would you want to have to try to track down a $40+ university-press book, or rather be able to click a single hyperlink and immediately get the lowdown on one or another "divine sage"? Well, if you're trying to protect the guru's reputation, you'd rather make people track the book down ... 'cause it's a hell of a lot more work, which few people will actually make the effort to do. "Censorship by the path of greatest resistance." Nice.]

Also, visiting brothel(sometimes [sic] plural in the article while single incident is narrated) [it's wrongly plural in Sil's book, from which I'm directly quoting, there] and consumption of alcohol are the only things mentioned in the article. But in 19th century Bengal, prostitutes were also great artists and connoisseur of art visited their places for the purpose of listening to music and watching dance. In fact, many of the drama artists were from class/caste of prostitutes, Shri Ramakrishna watched many of those dramas. Notion of brothel in India during those days is vastly different from that of western countries. And hindu spirituality does not believe in "eternal damnation" for finite 'immoral' acts such as assumed debauchery.

Well, it was Vivekananda himself who was lecturing his colleagues for their "assumed debauchery" in that brothel, so for damned sure there was somethin' going on, beyond the prostitutes there being "great artists," and Vivekananda and his drinkin' buddies visiting their place of work as "connoisseur[s] of art"! (LOL!!)

And, "hindu spirituality does not believe in 'eternal damnation' for finite 'immoral' acts such as assumed debauchery"? Well, neither do I! Bring on the booze and the ho's! "Sweet salvation," "House of the Rising (Spiritual) Sun," etc.

I also, however, don't believe in absurd, transparently censorial rationalizations for getting rid of uncomplimentary information regarding any "gods in the flesh," foisted on others by daft sheep/followers who will never actually be able to think for themselves.

What's actually maybe even more depressing is that the administrator for the Wikipedia entry on Philip Zimbardo looks to have pulled a comparable trick, reverting the page to how it looked before I (relevantly) linked from it to my "Gurus and Prisoners" chapter in STG. (That chapter, by the way, could put many a derivative, snooze-inducing post-grad psychology thesis to shame.)

This is probably not a good time, then, to bring up the fact that the woman (Christina Maslach) who finally got Zimbardo to stop his prison study was not only a post-graduate student of his at the time, but was also his girlfriend (and later, his wife).

Yep, he was fucking one of his fine students. In the "good old days," you could get away with that, hey? Power differentials in relatively closed societies (you know, like the ones in the prison study itself) be damned! In fact, it was completely expected that, if you were a female post-grad student working "under" a male prof, you'd also be sleeping with him. Really.

But, of course, you can't actually come out and say that. "Be polite, Geoff. Be polite."

P.S. If ya wanna help out in that Wikipedia "editing battle," all you gotta do is go here, click the "hist" link for each entry of mine, find the entry I had previously made (with the IP of 207.112.92.55), and click on the time listed immediately to the left of that IP address. (Usually, that time was late on August 25, 2005.) That will revert the page to what it should be. 'Cause what Goethean's doing is actually vandalism to those pages; he shouldn't be allowed to get away with it. (Unfortunately, the Wiki procedures for resolving a dispute like this and getting that clueless fool banned are way too time-consuming and convoluted for me to wade into.)

Alternatively, if you don't feel like being that "bad"—or if the page in question has had many edits since mine—consider this: If anyone other than me were to re-post the same links, in new edits, it couldn't possibly be viewed as "self-promotion" by me, could it? (Clicking on the "diff" [instead of "hist"] link for each entry in the aforementioned page will tell you what edits were made in that session; they can easily be copied-and-pasted into a new editing window.)

Update (8/27/2005): Well, the links to the appendix on Bohm, and to David Lane's debunking, are back. No sign of "Norman Einstein" or of Jim Andrews' essay, though: They've been removed for allegedly being "excessive sceptical-materialist links," with the comment that "maybe sceptic objections can be briefly incorporated in body of article."

(Since when do simple rational thought and the demand for properly conducted double-blind studies make one a philosophical "materialist"?! But then, maybe in the integral community they do. How pathetic.)

Frank Visser obviously feels differently, though, as he's seen fit to include links to both the "Norman Einstein" chapter and the essay on his Integral World "Criticism" page. And given that both of those pieces contain huge quantities of information which hadn't previously been formally published elsewhere, that's exactly the right thing for him to have done. The links aren't "excessive" in quantity, nor is the content excessively "materialistic," nor would spelling out the skeptical objections in the body of the kw article be a more concise or otherwise better way of presenting the information.

Sigh.... To paraphrase Basil Fawlty: I could spend the rest of my life trying to get those "expert" Wiki editors to see things which should be blindingly obvious. To "briefly incorporate" over 80 typeset pages of detailed criticisms of The Bald Wonder's fuck-ups? How, in integral heaven, could that possibly be done?! Well, it can't. Not even close. Real, properly trained editors would know that. (Even if it could be done, who's supposed to do that summarizing? Me? Just to watch Goethean censor it into oblivion as soon as it's posted? Thanks, but I have better things to do than play that game. They're just creating more work for me, in order that the finished product may convey less information—and thus (significantly) debunk less of Wilber's transpersonal/integral bumblings—than if they had sense enough to just leave the links there in the first place. Nice. Unbelievably stupid.)

But that's what you get when you send blatant amateurs to do a professional's job, isn't it?

Besides, if there really were an "excess" of links to external sources of information which debunk one's wikiwacky integral beliefs, might that not be simply because the evidence against the fairy-tale notions is so overwhelming? That the "integral" solution to that problem could be to delete the links is not even funny, much less is it competent.

How philosophically materialistic am I, really? Here's a direct quote from the very same "Norman Einstein" chapter which the intrusively-editing Kazlev considers to be "excessively skeptical-materialistic," to the point of inexcusably censoring/removing the link to it:

If the same purported sages were actually able to prove their claimed abilities to see auras, do verifiable astral remote-viewing or manifest objective coronas, for example, in a properly controlled environment, one might have some basis for confidence in the reality of their other internal experiences, even if those subtler experiences were not otherwise scientifically testable. (There is, after all, no a priori reason why everything should be "scientifically testable," in the physical laboratory or otherwise, in order to be "real.") But short of that, Wilber's hope that any amount of community verification might sort fact from fiction in mystical claims falls flat on its face. For, there are clearly no controls whatsoever in place to guard against meditators simply experiencing what they expect to experience, and then viewing that as a confirmation of the truth of the metaphysical theory previously taught to them.

"Materialistic"? Nonsense! It has nothing to do with "reductionism" or philosophical materialism. It's just demanding that proper controls be put in place to prevent people from inadvertantly (or deliberately) fooling themselves! (The "reality of ... internal experiences" there isn't about the ontological reality of the interiors/feelings of holons. Rather, it's about people claiming to be able to see auras and do astral traveling when proper testing shows that they can't, at which point their even-wilder claims as to visions of God or other experiences of higher levels of reality need not, and should not, be taken the least bit seriously. None of that, even if it unavoidably leaves one with little confidence that anything transpersonal actually exists, reduces interior states to anything merely materialistic. D'uh.)

Exactly the same demand for minimal professional competence in testing meditators' claims applies to the concerns voiced in Jim Andrews' essay. Yet the link to it, too, was removed first by Goethean (bullshit-claiming that it was an "attack link"), and then again by Kazlev, on the pretense that the essay was rooted in "materialism." It isn't. Not even close.

These ignorant "experts" can't even get that much right, yet they think they're in a position to intelligently sort fact from fiction. And such dense individuals then band together into communities—and cults (it's all along a continuum, with exactly the same psychological dynamics being operative)—and ensure that no truth gets heard other than what they can understand. And then they call that "peer review." Beautiful.

These are, after all, people who, even if they can see that Wilber has misrepresented (for example) Aurobindo's ideas, still childishly and desperately want to believe that the latter delusive fool was everything "divine" that he claimed to be.

They might as well believe in Santa Claus, and then diss (and censor) anyone who doesn't share that same wild delusion, as being "excessively skeptical-materialistic."

In fact, that's essentially exactly what they're doing. And when such people as that control the voice of a community, "democratic" editing there becomes a bad joke. 'Cause for every one contributor who can actually see things clearly, there will be many more who can't, and who will do their best to force the community to conform to their prejudices, to the point where truths which don't fit into their narrow view of reality simply vanish. (Exactly the same problem underlies why David Bohm's ideas in quantum theory are only beginning to be properly appreciated half a century after they were first published. And if Nobel-caliber ideas can be suppressed for that long even in a field of experimental hard science, how long do you think the unpleasant truth can be overlooked or explicitly deep-sixed in the spiritual world? For millennia, and counting.)

Even the fact that the most "inarguable" of the experiments which supposedly prove that meditation advances one through stages of psychological development have actually been done with such unprofessionally sloppy protocols as to make their otherwise-complimentary results worthless, cannot be heard. Nor can the corresponding provable fact that Wilber has demonstrably made things up out of thin air in touting their results, and unconscionably failed to warn his readers of the real and documented dangers of meditation, be spoken. (Note how these people are perfectly happy to accept the results of such experiments, and to find supposed accord between religion/spirituality and science, so long as the latter supports their half-baked beliefs. As soon as the experiments fail to confirm their fancies, however, the former are dismissed as being "skeptical-materialistic"! So shall it ever be, in religion's attitude toward science.)

Recently discovered this Skeptical Inquirer article on "David Bohm and Jiddo [sic] Krishnamurti":

To give you a glimpse into Krishnamurti's vagueness, here are a few typical excerpts from his talks:

Death is a renewal, a mutation, in which thought does not function at all because thought is old. When there is death there is something totally new. Freedom from the known is death, and then you are living.

When you love, is there an observer? There is an observer only when love is desire and pleasure. When desire and pleasure are not associated with love, then love is intense. It is, like beauty, something totally new every day. As I have said, it has no yesterday and no tomorrow.

As long as there is a time interval between the observer and the observed it creates friction and therefore there is a waste of energy. That energy is gathered to its highest point when the observer is the observed, in which there is no time interval at all. Then there will be energy without motive and it will find its own channel of action because then the "I" does not exist....

You can face a fact only in the present and if you never allow it to be present because you are always escaping from it, you can never face it, and because we have cultivated a whole network of escapes we are caught in the habit of escape.

Those examples, however, are much less of a commentary on The Krinsh's "vagueness" than they are another embarrassing demonstration of the absence of even the slightest comprehension, throughout the skeptical community, of what Self-Realization, "witnessing consciousness," and "not recoiling from relationships" are. That is even independent of whether or not the "always-already state" is ontologically real: Skeptics don't even seem to know that it's claimed to exist. After all, Shirley MacLaine and Sylvia Browne have never mentioned it, so how important could it be?

Yes, Gardner facilely quotes K's phrase "choiceless awareness." But to him it's just another entry in a "mix of dull platitudes and murky phrases" ... as are any discussions of the mystical dissolution of the division between subject and object—which, again, need not be ontologically real in order for it to be a valid area of comment, which is exactly what K was subjecting it to in saying that "the observer is the observed," etc.

To Gardner, though, it seems to be just another excuse for directing skeptical mocking at a transpersonal subject, without at all understooding what exactly he's making fun of. (Shades, there, of Monica Pignotti's equally uninformed and equally happy dissing of Ken Wilber's theories as being typical "New Age gibberish.")

Say what you want about Ken Wilber—and I've personally said quite a lot—but he does understand at least that one point of practical metaphysics. He has further valuably expounded on it, from his own experience, in many of his books—including the obvious One Taste—with a clarity which I have not found elsewhere. (See? I can "appreciate" the non-fucked-up elements of other people's work too! Even of Kensho....)

Given that Gardner utterly misses those fundamental points of metaphysics/ontology, it's no surprise that he goes on to dismiss Krishnamurti's teachings as being mere "watered-down Buddhism in which the key message is that everything is interconnected and one must live in the moment, without fear, and accept everything that happens with resignation and tranquility." (If that were all actually valid as a metaphysics, though, wouldn't it actually be more than enough of a "message"? Or do you have to have a definitive "yes" or "no" bullshit-answer as to the existence of God, in order for a teaching to be worth listening to? Gardner's own belief, by the way, is in a cosmic "Yes," there.)

By contrast, a recognized "transmitted Zen master" of my e-acquaintance wrote to me, after reading the Krinsh chapter in STG, saying that "I still think his books are quite useful." That's a real Buddhist talking, who currently teaches in Asia, is focused on nondual transcendence, and understands the religion from the "inside," as opposed to having merely read a few exoteric textbooks (or whatever) on it.

I do sympathize with Gardner's difficulty in trying to get through any of Krishnamurti's books "without falling asleep," though. I've experienced exactly the same soporific effect.

More, from Gardner:

Krishna, as his friends called him, freely admitted his compulsive lying. He blamed it on simple fear of having his deceptions detected.

Well, no. Krishnamurti blamed his compulsive lying on "fear," yes; but fear of what, he never said! The idea that Krishnamurti was trying to cover up other "deceptions" (e.g., his public celibacy and simultaneous private, quarter-century-long affair with a good friend's wife) is just Gardner laying his own wild and completely unjustified interpretations on top of Krishnamurti's statement! That is, it's mere wishful/skeptical thinking on Gardner's part, nothing more valuable or true. (The information which Gardner has paraphrased and dishonestly re-interpreted can be found on page 200 of Radha Sloss's Lives in the Shadow with J. Krishnamurti: "My mother asked him once why he lied and he replied with astonishing frankness, 'Because of fear.'" That is the end of the relevant statement and commentary in Sloss's book; the next paragraph is on a different topic.)

Again from Gardner's article:

Bohm's later writings swarm with neologisms such as holomovement, rheomode, levate, enfoldment, soma-significant, and implicate and explicate levels of reality....

Bohm's Eastern metaphysics, even though it helped shape his interpretation of quantum mechanics, should not be held against the potential fruitfulness of his pilot wave theory.

Bohm's holomovement, and his (enfolded) implicate and (unfolded) explicate orders, were indeed frequently applied to transpersonal theories/pursuits, even by Bohm himself. Nevertheless, they are grounded in exactly the same mathematics as underlies the rest of his ontological formulation of quantum theory. (The quotes from Bohm himself to iron-clad prove that can all be found collected here.) And the previous article in Gardner's two-part series concerned exactly that theory, even though he only addresses the simpler (i.e., non-field-theory) aspects of it.

I can't tell from Gardner's own ambiguous writing whether he is against the implicate and explicate orders and holomovement as such, or whether he's just objecting to any attempt to relate them to Eastern metaphysics. If it's the former, he's embarrassingly guilty of not taking the time to properly understand what Bohm's ideas are actually about, before presenting himself as being fit to determine both their positive and their (allegedly) negative aspects.

Incidentally, The peer-reviewed paper in which the implicate and explicate order ideas were first given quantitatively by Bohm was published in 1973, in the Foundations of Physics journal. As such, the existence of the same "implicate and explicate levels of reality" is no mere "Eastern metaphysics-influenced" conjecture; rather, it's solid physical science. Further, those orders cannot be divorced even from Bohm's early work—hell, the enfolding/unfolding process inarguably exists even in the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory, in the alternating phase-entangled propagation and collapse of the quantum wavefunction!—and stand completely independent of his interest in Eastern metaphysics.

Also: It's typically "Jiddu" Krishnamurti, not "Jiddo." Google it, and you'll find a mere 50+ references to the latter—most of them to Gardner's article—and 78,000 to its "Jiddu" version. More people will understand exactly whom you're writing about if you use the completely standardized nomenclature, right?

Well, well, well. This fine essay from Jim Andrews ("Deep Trout") concerning the problems with Ken Wilber's work arrived on my desk today.

Ironically, in one of those weird ways in which "life imitates art," the daughter (Joan) of the real Deep Throat, Mark Felt, is herself apparently a follower of Wilber's "Greatest Living Realizer" megalomaniac friend, Adi Da. (You don't suppose that she's going to be donating any of her share of the advance for her father's Watergate story to Da Totem Master, do you? Say it ain't so.)

Not quite as bad as Congressman Leo J. Ryan's daughter becoming an ardent disciple of Rajneesh—after Mr. Ryan had been shot down in cold blood when trying to leave Jonestown, precipitating the mass suicides there—but still, close enough.

Ah—this, from Integral Naked, is very nice:

Several years ago, when the Institute was only a year or two old, there was a couple from Boulder who worked with Ken. They gave a great deal of their time and money (and house and cars) in support of the early meetings. But they were too "green" for Ken, they insisted everybody had something worth saying. Ken asked Don Beck, who had only met them a couple times at social functions, to evaluate their developmental level. Don obliged, and Ken forwarded his response to the couple and to half a dozen of the other "staff" who were involved in the fledgling organization. Don's evaluation was not flattering and was used as an excuse to push this couple to the side (again, PUBLICLY). They drifted away quickly and the whole incident was forgotten.

There are a lot of things in the early years that Ken would like forgotten.

How beautifully consistent and "in character" of Wilber and his Integral Dictatorship.

And note how that cultic environment and intolerance is exactly what you'd expect any relatively closed community with (esp. textbook narcissistic) leaders and their henchmen to degenerate into: the purging of anyone who threatens, even mildly and in the most innocent and inadvertent ways, the insecure, power-hungry leadership. (Letting everyone be heard, even just in proportion to what he/she has to say that's worth hearing, assuredly threatens anyone who just wants to dictate his point of view to the world—as kw does, ragingly, throughout his A Brief History of Everything, in its "Q & A monolog," for example.)

"Everybody has something worth saying" in the integral world.

But some Integral Realizers are more equal than others.

Unfortunately, it's not just "the early years" of kw's tyranny in the Integral Institute which he might like to forget. Rather, his pattern of marginalizing/denigrating people whose ideas or behaviors threaten his own high position in the transpersonal/integral world goes back at least a quarter of a century, to his ignorant dissing of David Bohm's Nobel-caliber work in physics. And since he hasn't changed at all since then, the same shit will be going on today and tomorrow with him, indefinitely.

If Wilber could have quietly purged the real genius (and competitor) Bohm from the transpersonal world, while still keeping his "sagely" public face and reputation intact, don't you think he would have? 'Tis the time-honored tradition of totalitarian dictators. And guru-figures are nothing if not totalitarian dictators. And the only thing which has kept Wilber from explicitly functioning as a guru, in my opinion, is his fear of accepting responsibility for how his actions affect others. (You can easily see, in kw's indefensible support of Adi Da and Andrew Cohen, a willful blindness to the fact that his stupid but respected endorsements of those two world-class idiots are leaving a trail of shattered lives. Anyone with any comprehension of what responsibility means would be horrified to realize what he had done, there. For Wilber, however, it's just "another day at the office.") He explicitly admitted that same tendency to avoid (i.e., in a fear of accepting) responsibility to his late second wife in the 1980s, you know, when she called him on the fact that he was blaming her for his lack of interest in writing at that time. Correspondingly, in his current "pandit" position as "integral top dog," he can lap up all the respect and obeisance which his followers lay at his feet, without taking responsibility ("everything comes from the guru") for how his moronic fuck-ups negatively affect them.

Interestingly, with regard to the purging of "unacceptable" types of thinking in the "holy, transpersonal/integral" world, with its vow to "face the Truth, no matter what the consequences": I have still (predictably) not received a response from The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology to my paper on Wilber vs. Bohm, submitted to them in November of 2003, which has since become the above-linked Appendix. Why do you think that is? (Hint: That paper doesn't even debunk the delusional beliefs of the JTP Board of Editors in leprechauns and the like. Rather, it simply shows that the "Einstein" of their chosen field is in fact incompetent and/or radically dishonest, even in his "professional" work. And for that, it "cannot exist" in their fuzzy, "transrational" world. Indeed, if the "unparalleled genius" of the field is provably a bumbling fool ... what must the dregs be like?)

Neil Osborne, lead singer of the Canadian rock band 54-40, has guested on Ken Wilber's Integral Naked forum.

Their recent (2003) album, Goodbye Flatland, was explicitly "inspired by the writing of Ken Wilber." (For some reason, the IN site itself gives that title as Beyond Flatland. Sigh. No such thing as details in the "orienting perspective" integral world, is there?)

And yet, contrast of contrasts, their drummer, Matt Johnson, describes himself as being a "loyal subscriber to both Skeptic Magazine and The Skeptical Inquirer," and touts the promotion by those magazines of "the value of scientific inquiry, reason and critical thought."

Well, I guess you don't get points in life for consistency. And judging by the songwriting credits, Osborne has a much greater voice in the band's direction than does Johnson. The sad fact, regardless, is that Wilber's ideas crumble into a pile of fairy dust as soon as you start directing even the gentlest questioning toward them. Meaning that, if the drummer in question were to actually start productively applying the "critical thought" which he claims to value, that would be sure to generate a great deal of tension in the band. 'Cause Osborne, here, has hitched his metaphysical wagon to a Death Star.

A Bald Death Star, whose life's work serves much better as an example of how not to do philosophy (and biological evolution, and mathematics), than it could ever serve as an exemplar for anything of value.

Julia Sweeney quotes in her July 21 blog from Eric Hoffer's The True Believer:

How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables.

And so it goes, for Wilber and his "vegetables."

And yes, there are many televangelists bilking the American people out of their retirement funds. D'uh. "Strange," isn't it, that I haven't covered the likes of Jimmy Swaggart in STG? Never mind that the book is already way too long, and that prior to adding the chapter on the RCC I had been stupidly taken to task by "scholars" like Jeffrey Kripal, who wondered out loud, on the basis of a mere table of contents and back-cover copy for the rough draft of STG, why I supposedly hadn't debunked any "Abrahamic" figures and religions in it. (The implication there, of course, was that I must have an "anti-Asian" bias, as opposed to an "anti-papal" one, to do things so "unfairly." Yet, that very same table of contents already had full chapters on Ken Wilber, Adi Da [Franklin Jones], and Andrew Cohen. Can't get much more Abrahamic than "Cohen," can you? But of course that's lost on the likes of Kripal, whose talent for making things up and twisting/misquoting the information from his research sources is perhaps exceeded only by Wilber himself.)

There are many common-sense definitions of "cult" which the Catholic Church as a whole, even without focusing on the worst of its individuals' misbehaviors, fits to a tee. For example, Kramer and Alstad: "We define 'cult' as a group where the leader is unchallengeable and considered infallible." I've already explicitly given that particular example in STG, by the way. It's already there for anyone with eyes open to see!

The following is also stated explicitly in the very same chapter:

Were I aware of any comparable exposés of misbehaviors within guru-disciple-like relationships among Freemasons, Jews, gays or hermaphrodites (cf. Sai Baba), where the guru-figures were widely viewed as purveying "authentic, transformative spirituality" and as being among the "best" in their respective paths, I would happily have included them.

Feel free to add televangelists to that list if you like; makes no difference to me. But while the pope may be "the best Catholic," and be accepted as such even by people outside of the cult/religion, are you honestly going to try to argue, with a straight face, that Jimmy Swaggart or Oral Roberts, etc., are the "best" in their respective sects? 'Cause that is one of the explicitly stated criteria for inclusion in STG, y'know. The RCC certainly fails on the "authentic, transformative" part, yes; but given that their environment matches point-by-point on any reasonable definition of what a cult is, it's exactly that (matching) fact which merits their inclusion. (I learned about the Jewish Chabad Lubavitch group around a month ago. They believe that their late rabbi was the Messiah, and have correspondingly formed a cult of devotion around his memory. Simple, garden variety stuff, without sodomized altar boys/cantors or cover-ups of that criminal behavior. Nowhere near enough material there for a full chapter in STG; but still, "it's a start.")

And as far as televangelists or Protestant churches "brainwashing" people goes, that's a very sloppy and dubious use of the word, which few people (if any) in cult studies would agree with. Again, as I've explicitly quoted in STG, via Janja Lalich:

Mind control is regarded as being effected via techniques which include "sleep deprivation, special diets, controlling information going in and out, peer pressure, extensive indoctrination sessions, such as long hours of chanting, meditating, listening to droning lectures and mild forms of trance induction that ... reduce the person's ability to think clearly."

You shouldn't accuse people of utilizing brainwashing or mind control without first knowing what it is, right? And while televangelist lectures may well qualify as "droning," and watching TV in any context as a "mild form of trance induction," to regard a few hours per week of non-residential exposure to that as "brainwashing" is way out of line.

There are probably many cult studies "experts" who would say that you cannot have a cult without also having brainwashing of its members—the argument being that no one would believe all of the wonky things which any cult teaches if they hadn't first been involuntarily robbed of their ability to think clearly. Yet people in the "real world" convert to Christianity every day, taking the Garden of Eden literally, with no such "brainwashing" to get them to believe such fairy tales, and will then even defend their newfound beliefs to the death.

What never seems to be mentioned in discussions of why people join cults is the psychological need to belong to a saved "in" group, and to have the social support of others who are equally "saved." Personally, I am convinced that the average human being can talk himself into believing almost anything if doing so will get him into the "in" group, even without any "cultish brainwashing." After all, when even "love bombing" and peer pressure are quoted as techniques of "brainwashing" or mind control, it is painfully obvious that very little persuasion is actually needed in order to push the average person "over the edge," into believing whatever will satisfy his "belongingness needs."

In any case, I don't at all deny the (moderately) cult-like aspects of any Protestant (or Methodist or Pentecostal, etc.) minister who goes around claiming that God speaks to him. I am also aware, however, that there is a vast difference between mere "charlatan" and "cult leader," particularly if the former is still presenting the Bible, not himself, as the ultimate authority. And, unless you're a "meditation master," that same preposterous claim is not likely to qualify you for "divine" status among the pseudo-academics (Kensho Wilber, Dickhead Anthony, etc.) who pretend to be able to separate "authentic," vertically-transformative religions from merely "legitimate," socially-useful (ha!) ones.

In general, Catholic priests (like shamans) are dangerously viewed as being much closer to God than are their flock, or ministers of other faiths. And so long as you accept Jesus as your personal savior, you can at least leave the Protestant religion and join some other one, without imperiling your eternal salvation. In the Catholic Church, by contrast, according to its own laws, if you fail to confess even one "mortal sin" (including masturbation) to your superiors, your salvation is toast. That is, you cannot leave the religion (and its father-confessors) without suffering eternal damnation.

For damned sure that is cultish! And for damned sure it applies to the Church "as a whole"! D'uh! And for damned sure that makes the Catholic Church a far worse environment than its Protestant counterparts.

All of that is obvious—blindingly, road-to-Damascus obvious—if you just think clearly about it and competently research it. And it's (sigh) already given quite clearly in the "Sodomy and Gomorrah" chapter of STG.

But, of course, it is much easier to just knee-jerk object to any thorough analysis of the many cult-like aspects of the Catholic Church, and mix in the blinkered idea that anyone who disagrees has ostensibly simply been too "conditioned" to see the RCC clearly (couldn't be any other reason, could there, huh?), than it is to actually go through the details of that. Easier to blithely and lazily accuse others of making "gross mistakes" rather than to get it right yourself.

I have no objection at all to having my ideas questioned, publicly or otherwise. But bumbling attempts at criticism from the presumptuous "I AM NOT CATHOLIC" camp are as worthless as are comparably inept critiques from the "I AM NOT A CULTISH FOLLOWER OF KEN WILBER, REALLY, I'M NOT" perspective. Neither are worth (to take Python out of context, again) so much as "a lump of shit."

Henry VIII has precisely nothing to do with any of that (but thanks for the utterly irrelevant history lesson anyway). I've been "despective" [??] toward the Catholic Church? If by that you mean "disrespectful": Guilty as charged! (Blimey, I wasn't expecting the Spanish Inquisition....)

So, this guy may not be Catholic. But there's absolutely something weird goin' on, for him to be so unable to see so many things which were given so explicitly in STG ... and to then accuse me of being "conditioned" and taking the easy way out, in "following" the "obsessive" Python! (What the Fuck??!) To enjoy seeing gurus and their cult-like environments mockingly debunked, but then gag so obviously on the unavoidable suggestion that Jesus (and the pope) and the Church would succumb to the same psychological dynamics ... well, as Hank Hill would say, "That boy ain't right."

What I suspect we have here is a devoted member of some non-Catholic Christian denomination, who accepts Santa Christ as his personal Savior. 'Cause there really aren't that many perspectives, outside of the Christian one, that would find a documentation of the obviously cultish aspects of the RCC to be so offensive ... and then be so needlessly "despective" to the boys from Python. Who but a Bible-swallowing Christian would find my tearing-down of various "false gurus and messiahs" to be "hilarious" and "refreshing," but then be so laughably bothered by both televangelists (who sully his "true faith") and by a couple of utterly inconsequential references to Python in STG? (Gurus and messiahs are all false, btw, including J.C. himself, precariously assuming that the Galilean Sensation ever even lived, much less "rose from the dead.") And who but a "good Christian" would know the Henry VIII history?

So he, in that case, has found "the one true religion," while all others are false and deserve to be "refreshingly" mocked. Beautiful. That's exactly how a cult member would react, dont'cha know? Really, it is exactly how cult members behave.

And note: The gentleman has offered nothing against my well-argued conclusion that the Roman Catholic Church is indeed a cult. Instead, he has just easily dismissed my position as arising ("between the lines") from an uninformed prejudice on my part against the Church, fuelled by history and by Python; and finished that all off by insulting me. And he's excused that immature, unreasoning perspective, and his associated "teaching" of me, as being in line with my own "defense of the good effects of positive, honest criticism." Predictable. Note also: By cognitive dissonance, my writings and arguments are "excellent" ... right up until the point where exactly the same research and cogency impinges on the validity of his own cult belief system. Too damned predictable. (Compare: To defenders of Ramakrishna, 98% of the information in STG may well be valid, but Ramakrishna still "can't" have been a pedophile, even though he obviously was one. To "good Christians," 98% of the same book is "refreshing," but the documented information about the cult-like aspects of the Catholic Church only shows me to be "prejudiced." To persons who themselves spend time as authority figures in schools, high schools must be different in kind, not merely in degree, from prisons. To devotees of "crazy wisdom," I must be a Puritan to be bothered by narcissistic, megalomaniac, polygamous idiots like Adi Da. Fanatics devoted to Ken Wilber's wonky integral view of the "kosmos" cannot accept that not only is he a nasty egomaniac on a personal level, but he is also hopelessly inept and a proven bullshit artist on a professional level—a man who cannot be trusted to get even the simplest things right. To fans of Krishnamurti, his quarter-century affair with his manager's wife is not worth mentioning, as it doesn't discredit any of his theoretical teachings, even though it shows him to be a hypocrite. To disciples of Rajneesh, the gargantuan amounts of negative information regarding his complicity in the abuses perpetrated in his ashrams must all come from "unreliable" sources. And so on, and so on.... And note: None of that is merely "in theory"; rather, all of it has been thrown at me over the past few months, in daft attempts at "enlightening" me as to the perceived "shortcomings" of STG.)

I do ad hominem attacks too, of course. But I also back them up with tight logic to show that the person I'm criticizing is indeed a damned fool, before I actually come out and "call a spade a spade." This guy, sad to say, is indeed a spade: It takes no comprehension whatsoever to enjoy seeing religious positions one disagrees with be mocked, while gagging on any equally valid criticisms of childish beliefs and cultic behaviors too closely related to one's own. Anyone can laugh at the "out" groups, which to Christians are the "Satan-influenced" cults and "false gurus." To see one's own saved "in" group and wonky "Messiah" as being just another variation on the same nonsense, however, takes a fair bit more insight and courage.

I'm rarely ungrateful or ungracious in accepting a compliment; but positive reviews of STG from such an utterly fucked-up "Christian" perspective as the above mean nothing to me. Might as well have a devoted follower of one or another meditating guru tell me that my deconstruction of other guru-figures was excellent, but that he had still found the "one true master," and I'd be able to see that if I weren't so "conditioned" by prejudice against his group—which is, really, exactly what the daft guy above is saying, if I've guessed at all correctly about his affiliations.

The cultic aspects of the Roman Catholic Church exist independent of Henry VIII and his relationship to Rome. They exist independent of Monty Python. All you have to do is sit down and comprehensively list what the accepted characteristics of a "cult" are, and then equally comprehensively document the structure and behaviors of the RCC. (Which is exactly what I've done in STG.) You will find that, even as a whole, without focusing on the worst misbehaviors of its individual members, the RCC precisely fits any reasonable definition of what a "cult" is. That has nothing to do with my own attitude toward the Church; it has nothing to do with ostensibly prejudiced Jews or Anglo-Saxons. It's just facing the goddamned facts. Adults are supposed to be able to do that.

Incidentally, if you weren't already aware, Julia Sweeney (actress, formerly with SNL) has done a one-woman show (Letting Go Of God) concerning her transformation from Catholic to atheist. For thoughtfully exercising that simple freedom of speech, she has received volumes of hate mail, to the point of no longer doing her stage show, and has seriously considered moving from her home.

Hate mail, from "good Catholics." I mean, from good cultists, predictably desperate to defend their own closed system of thought from anything resembling questioning. Why? It's basic human/social psychology; and for that very reason, it too applies to the Church "as a whole."

If anyone misses that point, particularly while being demonstrably unable to pay attention to detail elsewhere ("reeds," "witches," etc.), how much has he really understood the material in STG? 'Cause the overarching point of the entire "otherwise excelent [sic]" book is exactly that, given any relatively closed (thought- or physical) environment with an "infallible" leader, the formation of a cult around that individual is practically unavoidable. And guess what: The Catholic Church is not an exception to that principle! D'uh!! (Protestant churches slightly better avoid that cultism simply for generally having much less of a "direct line to God" via their ministers, not for any more noble reason. It's the structure that's [slightly] different, not the psychology of the leaders or of the defensive followers.)

Guess what else: Skeptics who have been raised Catholic but outgrown that set of fairy tale beliefs have still enthusiastically endorsed STG, rather than "swinging and missing" at imagined flaws in it.

And in all seriousness, I do truly think that Monty Python provides a more intelligent perspective on the "Every Sperm is Sacred" Catholic Church than any defensive "good Christian" bloke will ever manage. The suggestion that my documentation of its cult-like characteristics has anything to do with Python or with prejudiced history, however, is just plain stupid.

(For more regressive Catholic cultism, in American politics now, read the Salon article Holy Warriors. Frightening stuff.)

Second verse, same as the first, goddammit....

And ... if you're really gonna be all hot and bothered about televangelism, get this: All four verses of the Talking Heads' classic song "Once in a Lifetime" "came directly from preachers," as did David Byrne's forehead-slapping "Ernest Angley" schtick.

Well that does it: I'm putting Tull's Aqualung album on, and cranking the volume WAY up!! I suggest you do the same. "Together, we can make a difference."

If yer lookin' for anti-spyware or anti-spam software, CounterSpy and iHateSpam (integrated with Outlook, Outlook Express, and Hotmail) are the best consumer values I know of: $19.95 each.

Update (8/19/2005): Um, except the iHateSpam utility evidently messes with some dll's that Windows Explorer uses, or something, so as long as it's installed you can't open Word or Excel files directly into their applications from within Windows Explorer. That, at least, has been my experience. So, that's $19.95 I just wasted.

"The thing that holds it together is the ideology itself," he said of al-Qaida's decentralized structure. "How do you attack an ideology? It's very rough to do." (more)

You don't have to spend much time in the cult-studies arena to realize that even the best of the theorists there rarely have much of a clue about even how to define what a "cult" is. No small part of that problem, I am certain, derives from the fact that many cult members grew up with, and then rejected, their families' traditional religions ... and then went right back to those religions as soon as they got out of their respective nontraditional "cults." So, obviously, whatever defines a "cult," and whatever causes people to join such controlling organizations, cannot (psychologically) be what also defines the "safe" traditional organizations which they still embrace, or what causes people to join those "safe" groups (which themselves were obvious cults in the distant past, even if less obviously so, now). In practice, of course, that division is utterly invalid: Whether your "saved" group is a traditional or a new one, you are as much a part of God's "chosen" group in the Catholic Church as you are in the Moonies, etc.—and no more free to leave.

Spend any time looking through the postings on Steve Hassan's Freedom of Mind Yahoo! group, and you'll also find the posters on that board insisting that all cults deceptively recruit. Yet, SRF, Adi Da's group, Trungpa's Buddhist cult, and even Gurdjieff do not aggressively recruit new members. Those are just the basic facts of the situation.

On the same board, you'll find experts (like Singer herself) insisting that cults are always leader-centered. Yet, not only can you not attack an ideology—as Jenkins observed, above—but an ideology can be every bit as imprisoning and unquestionable as a living leader. Every "safe," established religion proves that, in the "infallible" nature of its holy scriptures! D'uh!

You'll even find one of the FOM group's resident experts, former Scientologist Monica Pignotti, claiming (after a cursory glance through kw's website, in response to a question from another online group member about whether Wilber was a cult leader) that Wilber's writings are typical New Age "gibberish" ... but that he is probably not a cult leader.

Now, Ken Wilber is indeed a damned fool, whose integral environment is itself halfway to being a personality cult. But to blithely dismiss his ideas as being "gibberish" shows only that one has utterly failed to understand the technical vocabulary in which they're expressed. Quantum physics, too, would look like "gibberish" to anyone who had not made the effort to comprehend its symbols. Pignotti has not made that effort, in either field.

Hassan himself had recommended STG to several of the leaders of that group, including Ms. Pignotti, after I had previously offered her a free copy of the STG PDF. If someone doesn't want to become informed, though, preferring to stumble through an utterly uninformed view of an environment and set of integral teachings, after you've already brought the information right to their e-door, how much more can you spoon-feed them?

Nevertheless, to update the July 19 concerns regarding Wilber's trumpeting of the supposed benefits of meditation, as ostensibly derived from Charles Alexander's research:

If one actually makes the effort to wade through the relevant chapter in Alexander and Langer's Higher Stages of Human Development, past the 40+ pages of whackadoodle "Vedic theory" and respectful references to the Maharishi's "seven levels of consciousness," one finally reaches the Research Appendix. There, all of the juicy details of Alexander's "solid and ... repeated" research (in Wilber's unduly optimistic evaluation) are revealed.

Details like these, from pages 331-2 of Alexander's book:

In two samples (total n = 90) of maximum security prisoners followed over a one-year period, both long-term and new TM subjects significantly improved by one step on ego development in comparison to wait-list controls, dropouts, and those not interested in learning TM (controlling for pretest scores and demographic covariates). None of the four other treatment groups followed longitudinally changed significantly on this measure (Alexander, 1982). On the average, regular new meditators (who scored at a concrete operational level at pretest) improved from the "conformist" stage of ego development (corresponding to dominance of concrete thinking) to the "self-aware" level (corresponding to the onset of reflective functioning of the intellect); and regular advanced meditators shifted from the self-aware level to a "conscientious" stage (corresponding to a mature form of abstract reflection).

This advance of one step for the new meditators over a year period substantially exceeds that for college students over a four-year period (Loevinger et al., 1985), yet at an age (26-29 years) and education level (ninth grade) where such changes are unlikely to occur. Assuming [!!] that the advanced TM subjects started at a comparable ego level to the new TM group, they advanced a mean of two steps during less than three years.

So that's presumably where Wilber's gotten his "four years" and "two stages" information from, in his "kosmic konsciousness" claims that "if you take people ... and they meditate about a hour a day, then about four years later, they're two stages higher on any scale we give them."

Further, from Wilber's Kosmic Consciousness talks:

Another way to measure [the value of meditation] is to take the number of people that are at a particular stage of development in a particular development line like Jane Loevinger, and in her case, what she would call our level six, our integral level on our seven-level generic scale, she finds about 2% of the population reaches that stage. And after four years of meditation, 38% of people doing it reach that stage.

And from The Eye of Spirit:

That 38 percent broke through this ceiling with meditation is quite extraordinary. Moreover, if the Loevinger test is slightly modified to be more sensitive to those at the higher stages, 87 percent in one meditating population broke the conscientious barrier, with 36 percent scoring autonomous and 29 percent integrated. Alexander et al. (1990), p. 333.

But: It was eleven years of meditation, not four, that got 38% of Alexander's subjects to test at the autonomous/integrated level! From p. 332-3 of Alexander's book:

A longitudinal study ... compared change in ego development over an 11-year period in graduates from Maharishi International University (MIU), where the TM program is incorporated into the college curriculum, to change in graduates from three well-known universities offering standard curricula.... From the pool of respondents from each of the control universities, students were matched as closely as possible with MIU graduates on gender, pretest age, and college class (i.e., cohort group). All subjects (total n = 136) were at least 19 years of age at pretest during the late 1970s. Most MIU graduates were currently regular in TM practice; most control subjects also indicated that they currently practiced some form of self-development, stress-management, or exercise program for promoting physical and mental health (although none practiced TM)....

Whereas at pretest 9 percent of the MIU sample scored at Loevinger's higher "autonomous" and "integrated" stages, at posttest 38 percent reached these two highest stages.

So, when Wilber says that four years of meditation got 38% of subjects to the "integral level," that's just plain integral bullshit, from a man who cannot get even the simplest things right, even when attempting to quote the protocols from a simple longitudinal study.

(Likewise, ten years of TM practice underlay the study that had 87% scoring above the conscientious level. Page 333 of Alexander's book makes that explicit.)

In the "38%" study, too, the meditators were self-selected, even though later being "matched up" (=> potential rater/selection bias) against their control peers. So, that group went from 9% of them being autonomous/integrated to 38% of them being at those levels, while the "control" group had only 1% at those "two highest stages at both pretest and posttest." In a total of a mere 136 subjects from MIU and three control universities.

Since, in that prison study, "most control subjects also indicated that they currently practiced some form of self-development, stress-management, or exercise program," with mere exercise being lumped in with "self-development," and no indication as to what percentage of that "control" group was practicing forms of meditation other than TM ... it's really no proper "control" group at all. (That prison study, amazingly, was Alexander's 1982 doctoral dissertation at Harvard. Makes ya wonder what they're smokin' out there in New England, that such a hopelessly muddled approach to experimentation would even have been green-lighted, much less be worthy of a Ph.D. Have these "real geniuses" never heard of properly randomized, placebo-controlled protocol?)

Even if there were no selection or rater bias involved there, having only 136 total subjects means that exactly one person in the control group was at autonomous/integrated before, and after, the testing. So, there we have absurdly small sample sizes for measuring states of development that are rare to begin with, plus selection bias. Further, consider that people on the verge of breaking through to the higher levels, or those having an explicit interest in and expectation for psychological growth, etc., might well choose to meditate and/or enroll in MIU from that cause, thus introducing a non-causal correlation between meditation and psychological stage-growth as the study proceeded. (Such interests and expectations can affect one's performance on written tests of maturity, too. That is, expectation effects apply to those tests, even if expectations themselves don't create psychological stage-growth. Loevinger had to explicitly take that into account in planning the testing for her 1985 study. Alexander evidently has not proceeded with the same competence.)

Given all that, Alexander's studies, so foolishly valued and unduly praised by Wilber, have proved nothing.

The growth from 9% to 38% may well be causative rather than a mere correlation; who knows? But with Alexander's shoddy selection protocols and otherwise, a four-fold growth from 1% to 4% in their "control" group could have been just as significant, and meant exactly the same thing. For the sample size used (control group of ~65?), that growth from 1% to 4% represents just a couple of people in the control group breaking through!

So there are issues there, I think, not merely with regard to protocol, but even just in terms of basic statistical significance.

And, note that 9% of the final 38% were already at the integral level when the study began. Assuming that there was no measurable regression of the subjects' levels in that study, then as far as growth to that level goes: Only 38% - 9% = 27% of the subjects grew to the integral level, of the 100% - 9% = 91% who weren't already at it. That is, only 27/91 = 32% who weren't already "spiritually evolved" managed to grow to the integral level. Over a period of eleven years.

And that's supposed to be the (in Wilber's words) "doorway to God"? Something that (even neglecting all of the serious problems in the protocol) only works in any significant way for 1/3 of the people, over a period of more than a decade of regular practice?!

And for the 2/3 who did not thus grow, what might they have productively done with their lives in the hours which they had otherwise devoted to meditation? What have they lost, in sitting and chanting nonsense-syllables to themselves?

Interestingly, the above-mentioned study by Jane Loevinger, et al. ("Ego Development in College," in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1985, Vol. 48 (4), 947-962) showed female university students demonstrating a "slight but consistent loss" of ego development from their freshman to their senior years. That loss, in turn, "challenges one assumption of a widely accepted version of Piagetian theory (i.e., that stage development is irreversible)."

Conversely, though, as Loevinger notes, "Piaget can hardly be cited for the frequent assumption that moral or ego development occurs according to a strict stage sequence, rarely admitting of backsliding. In his study of the development of moral judgment, Piaget (1932) went out of his way to reiterate that there are no strict stages. Even with respect to capacity for formal operations, Piaget (1972) warned of backsliding in young adults outside their own specialties."

(Wilber actually admits that such regression can occur, as does Alexander. KW, however, qualifies [via Grof] the causes of that regression by saying that "under intense stress, or with certain types of meditation, or certain drugs, the self can regress to this [lowest] fulcrum and relive its various subphases and traumas, which tends to alleviate the pathology." None of those factors, of course, have anything to do with being "outside of one's formop specialties." Nor was the regression found in Loevinger's study merely a short-term, coping response to "intense stress," etc.)

Obviously, if one can backslide from formop even just for being "outside of one's specialties," attempting to correlate such stages of psychological development with three other quadrants (objective, cultural and social), as Wilber does, would become something of a bitch, as they say.

Of further interest, Loevinger notes that dormitory/fraternity/sorority life has been found to have a "constricting rather than a liberalizing effect with respect particularly to critical thinking," and thus to one's higher scoring on measures of psychological maturity. The worst possible combination for encouraging psychological growth, then, would surely be to live in a fraternity-like residence under a leader who can ostensibly do no wrong.

Ashrams, anyone? Or even, Integral Institutes, anyone? 'Cause even without living in residence there, good luck with trying to deeply question the "spiritually advanced" leaders if you hope to remain a member in good standing in that wonky, cult-like community. Rather, use your own mind in that environment to think critically about what you're being fed, and you will very quickly be demoted to the status of "untrustworthy asshole." That, after all, is exactly how I myself have been explicitly denigrated, for no greater sin than pointing out the fact that Ken Wilber is not professionally competent in any of the fields to which he has directed his astonishing inability to pay attention to detail, and converse penchant for making provably wrong "facts" up out of thin air.

As critics of the Ayn Rand cult—the former haunt of Wilber's good friend, Nathaniel Branden—have noted, "when people identify too closely with their system of beliefs, they have no choice but defend them tooth and nail from any hint of cognitive dissonance." That applies to integral beliefs and heroes just as surely as it does to Rand's Objectivist ones. It applies to groups of skeptics and scientists, too, except that the proper application of the scientific method works to eventually sort fact from fiction, limiting the length of time through which one can fool oneself.

Never forget that when Max Planck spoke of new ideas in science being accepted not for any logic of persuasion but simply for the older generation dying out and being replaced by a new group who had grown up with the more-radical view of reality, he was talking not about religious believers being unable to think clearly. Rather, he was directing that observation toward the supposedly rational scientific community itself.

A group which could, through its relentless criticism, drive a Ludwig Boltzmann to suicide a century ago, for his support of the then-unaccepted atomic hypothesis, should be careful when looking askance at religious cults which treat questioners of their leaders no more humanely. (The same holds true for Oppenheimer's dismissal of David Bohm's great work as being "juvenile deviationism" and his explicitly voiced attitude that "if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him" ... something which the global physics community did, quite successfully, for close to half a century, reacting "almost maniacally" to anyone who dared to take the idea of "hidden variables" seriously.) It is only the scientific method which separates such groups; the psychology and potential for cognitive dissonance and persecution of "unbelievers" is otherwise exactly the same.

Planck—one of only a handful of people to recognize the value of Einstein's 1905 ideas in the decade immediately following the publication of those—knew all that, even while being unable to admit to himself that Einstein's theories as to the discrete nature of radiation were right, while his own were relatively wrong. For, in recommending Albert for the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1913, Planck couldn't resist wrongly asserting that the former had "missed the target in his ... hypothesis of light quanta [i.e., photons]." (Planck wanted radiation to only be discrete in the emission/absorption event itself, as black-body radiation, etc., according to his own discovered law for that. And in order for him to be right, Einstein had to be "wrong." He wasn't, but he "had to be.")

And don't even get me started on the embarrassing psychological mirroring of bombastic skeptical leaders by their admirers. Gratuitous use of the word "twaddle" is a dead giveaway. Hell, any use of that Britishism by people not born across the pond is a dead giveaway.

In Ken Wilber's early (1981) book, Up from Eden, he had this to say regarding the supposed psychological and spiritual causes underlying war and the "substitute sacrifice" of human murder:

[U]nder the desire to kill lies the extroverted death impact, and under death impact lies the pull of transcendence. Murder, that is, is a form of substitute sacrifice or substitute transcendence. Homicide is the new form of the Atman project. The deepest wish of all is to sacrifice one's self—"kill" it—so as to find true transcendence and Atman; but, failing that, one arranges the substitute sacrifice of actually killing somebody else, thus acting on, and appeasing, the terrifying confrontation with death and Thanatos....

I am not denying the existence of simple, instinctive, biological aggression, in mammals or in humans. The coyote does aggress—but not out of hatred. As Ashley Montagu put it, the coyote doesn't kill the rabbit because it hates the rabbit but because it loves the rabbit the way I love ice cream. Man—and only man—regularly kills out of hatred, and for that we will have to look elsewhere than the genes....

I am suggesting that, in the cognitive elaboration between simple biological aggression and wanton human murder, death and death terror become all-significantly interwoven into the final motivation....

Thus, whatever natural aggression may be innately present in humans, the significant point is that it is amplified through conceptual domains, and part of that amplification includes the heightened apprehension of death, which, when turned outward, explodes into really vicious aggression and hostility, and in proportions not given instinctually. And that murderous hostility is pre-eminently the substitute sacrifice, a killing of others to magically buy off the death of the self. The original death terror becomes death-dealing; and there is the human source of joyous murder....

Aggression and mass homicide, in the form of war, generally began ... with the [agrarian] mythic-membership structure.

And yet, from the December, 1995, National Geographic article by Peter Miller (p. 106) on "Jane Goodall," concerning Goodall's decades-long field studies of chimps in Tanzania:

"When I first started at Gombe, I thought the chimps were nicer than we are," Jane recalls wistfully. "But time has revealed that they are not. They can be just as awful."

Frequently tender and compassionate, humanity's closest living relatives are also capable of scheming, deceiving, and waging war. It came as a shock to Jane in 1974 when patrols of chimpanzees from the Kasakela community—one of four groups in the 20-square-mile park—began attacking chimps from the Kahama community to the south. She was stunned by reports of stealthy warriors moving through the forest in single file, hair bristling from fear and excitement, stepping from stone to stone to avoid making noise in what came to be known as the Four Year War.

By the end of the conflict, the Kahama community—seven males and three adult females and their young—had been annihilated. Researchers witnessed five of the attacks, in which the Kasakela chimps tore at their victims' flesh with their teeth as if they were common prey.

Goodall's best guess as to the origins of that extermination? That the territorial Kasakela males were taking back land which they had previously occupied. That was purely a guess on her part, though, to try and make sense of the chimps' actions.

Further, the warring of those chimps was disclosed by Goodall as early as a May, 1979, National Geographic article—several years before Wilber's copyrighting of Up from Eden!

So, quite obviously, Wilber has once again inexcusably gotten his basic facts wrong, here. (That is even aside from his more recent admissions that 58% of foraging [i.e., pre-agrarian, pre-mythic-membership] cultures engaged in "frequent or intermittent warfare." Yet, amazingly, as recently as 1996, in the same A Brief History of Everything, he was still insisting that apes do not make war! [Chimps are apes of equatorial Africa.]) If one sticks to the properly vetted data, rather than just making things up out of thin air, it is clear that chimps (and dolphins too, apparently) are just as capable of extended warring as are human beings, for what look to be quite comparable reasons and emotions.

One assumes, though, that any "cognizance of their own mortality," and consequent hypothesized "substitute sacrifice" on the part of the chimps and dolphins, wouldn't really enter into it!

Foraging (i.e., pre-agrarian) yet war-making chimps—having a lifespan of from 30 to 50 years—exist in rigidly hierarchical societies led by alpha males. And, "like neighborhood bosses, [they] engage in much handshaking, back-slapping, and hugging as they form shifting alliances." Likewise, a female student questioner once asked Jane Goodall about what happens when an adolescent female chimp joins a new community. Goodall replied that the males are predictably delighted, but the females beat her up. "One strategy the newcomer can use, however, is to attach herself to a high-ranking female, even if she is treated badly by that female. The others will eventually accept her." As the questioner observed in response, that "sounds just like high school."

None of that documented behavior, of course, requires one to postulate any drive to transcendence, or anything else transpersonal, in the "kosmos"!

Dr. Goodall, interestingly, has had her own "spiritual awakening":

From her description, her experience seemed to be a pure consciousness experience—a sensate-only experience of the purity and perfection of the actual world. Thinking about it afterwards, she felt the experience must have been a mystical experience or a spiritual revelation—simply because there was no other explanation available to her. This experience proved to be a turning point in her life—she changed from skeptic to spiritualist, from scientist to saviour, from feeling lonely to being loved, from feeling hopelessness to having a "reason for hope." She saw human evolution as the eventual triumph of Good over Evil and began to cement her place as a champion of the good in the battle against evil—a Saviour, not only of Mother Earth and "her" creatures, but also of Humankind.

And it is, of course, just a short step from that to Goodall's vouching for Ammachi, the "Hugging Avatar," as being "God's love in a human body."

Sigh.... Well, at least Goodall got some genuine science done before going all wonky. Not every "enlightened, integral" being can say that.

Oh, joy. New forthcoming bookie from Ken Wilber: The Integral Operating System.

With fold-out maps 'n' everything.

And again with the "Einstein" thing. Oy.

I recently came across at least three (biographical) books on amazon where dissatisfied customers noted that the author(s) had gotten one obvious fact wrong, and that it made them wonder how much else might be wrong in the book. By contrast, even after reading around 100 typeset pages of documented, serious issues with kw's work and character, across evolution, physics, and elsewhere, I have still had Wilberites explicitly take comfort in the apparent fact that none of it impacted on the core of kw's model.

Did they then undertake the thorough, systematic review of Wilber's source-materials which desperately needs to be done, to properly catalogue the wide range of subjects on which kw has potentially misunderstood or misrepresented ideas which he claims support his own? No: They simply took comfort in the fact that I, in my mere few hundred hours of Wilber-related research, had not found any obviously fatal flaws with kw's hierarchical, four-quadrant notions.

To question the "integral religion" is not easy, after all.

In reality, of course, Wilber's misrepresentations of Spiral Dynamics certainly do affect his "integral" model, as does the failure of subtle bodies/auras and energies to show themselves in properly conducted, double-blind tests ('cause there goes the transpersonal aspects of his objective and interobjective quadrants, right out the window). So, too, does Wilber's misrepresentation of basic evolution in attempting to find a holonic kosmos driven by Eros into expressing higher and higher forms of consciousness—where he (laughably) thinks that even physical life-form evolution cannot be explained without that Intelligence.

Personally, judging from kw's appeal to Behe as an "expert" in the "integral" (i.e., Intelligent Design) form of evolution, I still think he hasn't understood high-school-level Darwinian evolution, in spite of doing related graduate-level research. But I'm also open to his implicit claim that he was deliberately deceiving his readers—i.e., lying to them—on those same points, if he insists.

It is amazing, is it not, how solidly Wilber proves the adage that "what is good is not original, and what is original is not good"? And so very much of his work is "original"!

Where, oh where, is the Bulwer-Lytton bad-fiction contest when you need it?

Close runner-up, from Davin Seay's Stairway to Heaven: The Spiritual Roots of Rock 'n' Roll:

If Pentecostalism was folded into the substance of Elvis's music, like eggs folded into pancake batter, then it can only be said to have been vengefully curdled by the pounding piano riffs of Jerry Lee [Lewis].

Or, could this be the champion?

Grave, delicious Kate, plump owl in her tangled nest of puzzled hair with nipples blowing tiny kisses through a cotton vest.... Kate Bush, bushy Kate [!] laid out for me by the EMI artroom boys with a gourmet's delight like a table for guests. A strawberry tea spread, with eyes like doughnuts full of jam, and butter lips and full cream cheeks spread with a blunt knife by the vicar's wife...

—Fred Vermorel, The Secret History of Kate Bush

"It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a guitar chord rang out...."