Blog — August, 2006

The family, further risking our collective eternal souls, also made intermittent trips into the city to check out lectures on spiritualism and Kirlean photography—the purported capture of human auras on film, which is actually just corona discharges of electricity, i.e., nothing parapsychological. We also had occasional readings done by supposed mediums—a Mrs. Howse in the Charter House Hotel, for one. From her, we learned that we were all "very old souls," and that I "would be successful at anything I put [my] mind to." :)

Through my mother's initial bout with cancer, and my father's "heart disease" (i.e., misdiagnosed back pain) around the same time, we got in touch with a naturopathic doctor in Winnipeg. And so, from a "meat and potatoes and potato chips and soft drinks" family, in short order we became a "carrot cake and granola" one—cutting-edge evangelists to the surrounding community on the importance of diet and vitamin therapy.

That wholistic doctor was also practicing iridology and muscle-testing—the idea that holding a sample, or even just thinking of, some food or drug, will affect one's strength measurably. (There was enough of the scientist in my father that he hoped to objectively test that claim via spring-scales from the lab in the high school where he taught, but was stymied in that plan by being unable to find appropriately strong ones.) For that, and for some relatively trumped-up charges like working in his office in his stocking feet, the same naturopathic physician was being hassled by the local College of Physicians and Surgeons for his purported lack of medical knowledge. Perhaps that was not without reason, in hindsight, but at the time we all certainly sympathized with him in that "witch hunt."

Anyway, it turned out that the doctor in question was also running the Ananda meditation group in Winnipeg—for the northern California ashram founded by J. Donald Walters, former vice president of Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship. He will have mentioned Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi during one of the summer evenings when we had him and his family down for fresh strawberries, but I didn't track him down and pursue that further until after my mother's death from a recurrence of her cancer a number of years later, when I was in my third year of university.

When I finally did read that "classic" book, however, during my first summer away from home while working at a fishing lodge, I had no difficulty in believing that every word in it was true. In part, that was due to the high regard I had for the doctor in question—I would have taken very seriously any book or spiritual path he might have recommended. But mostly it was just because I wanted to believe all of the fairy tales, had been fairly disgusted with the materialistic emphasis of the introductory philosophy course I had aced the previous year, and had no idea that any paranormal claims had ever been tested and found to not be what they were cracked up to be.

So, I did what any good "seeker of Truth" with God-realization as a newfound goal would have done: Signed up for the SRF Lessons, attended their annual Convocation later in the same summer, and took kriya meditation initiation first by mail and then in person in L.A. in the autumn of 1988. And swore off drugs, alcohol (even while working throughout the '80s as a bartender at the lodge), and other assorted pleasures. All because my perfect Divine Guru, and God, "wanted me to."

As another former follower of Yogananda lamented, "It makes me wish that I had gotten involved with a tantric sex cult instead of SRF, to at least have had some fun being brainwashed."

On the bright side, although I had previously planned to switch to a vegetarian diet even just for animal-rights reasons, Yogananda's endorsement of that menu was what finally provided me with the impetus to act on those ideals, switching nearly "cold turkey" on the flight down to the Convocation in 1987.

So I spent my twenties and early thirties immersed in tofu, meditation, and the extended writing of my first book on Eastern philosophy and metaphysics (which I started in the summer of 1989). And through all that, doing relatively menial labor—including a year at an organic food store, where I started as a cashier and ended up re-programming the cash registers.

That store actually had a female shaman on its Board of Directors. In her astral journeys, she had "seen" that employees were stealing from the store, and that the next manager of that enterprise would "walk out of the woods." Of course, neither of those statements turned out to be even remotely accurate. (The imagined theft of produce, though, did have certain points in common with Yogananda's "Cauliflower Robbery" chapter in the Autobiography.)

I was told that the same shaman's advice, to a co-worker who had paid for her services, was that the latter needed to learn to "lie more." That client, in turn, was herself able to "talk to the herbs." That is, one day in the store, while walking past the bulk herbs section, she heard some of the desiccated product there crying out psychically in fear. With no dearth of compassion for dried plants, she explained to the herbs-in-jars where they were and how they had come to be there, thus calming them down.

Her sister was clinically schizophrenic. A residential member of the Ananda community, too, it turned out.

Working in that community-owned store in environmental and dietary ways to "make the world a better place" was basically the last "real world" job I could imagine having any meaning for myself. So, after a year of getting disillusioned with all of the (neopagan, etc.) stuff that was ingrown and overlapping with the organics movement, I applied to SRF's Hidden Valley (HV) ashram, to be allowed to stay there as a resident volunteer. I had already spent a month there over Easter in 1996, and was now seriously considering the idea of staying there permanently.

On the bright side, it was that nine-month stay that got me permanently out of watching television, to do productive things with my spare time rather than just being passively entertained. And I did meet a few worthwhile people there—maybe 20% of the whole, though among the official monastic leaders it was mostly just the ones in blue shirts (i.e., the novices) that I found to have anything resembling real humility. And, if the particular short-tempered, oppressively negative, visibly neurotic supervisor with whom I had to deal for the final six months hadn't gotten me tied up into such a tight ball of stress that I literally still haven't recovered from that, I would never have found the SRF Walrus board online, and never posted my story there.

In short, if there is one person who is to credit for unintentionally setting me on the path to showing our world's gurus to be fools, and their ashrams to be prisons whose power structure corrupts the leaders and drives their followers to despair, it was him.

Of course, while in that environment, I was explicitly told by other managers of the work I was doing there that when I had meditated more and become more spiritually advanced (like them), I wouldn't feel the need to be creative in writing books and music. That is, I would just "serve Master's work" by donating money and labor to it, without presuming to do anything original or truly creative in life.

When I left Hidden Valley in the summer of 1999, it took me several months to "decompress" and realize just how ridiculous the environment there was. Half a dozen viewings of the South Park movie in theaters at that time was actually very liberating for me, after having been for so long in the artificially "holy" ashram environment, curtailing my tongue and sleeping with "hands outside the sheets," etc. Writing a fifteen-page letter of complaint to SRF's president, Daya Mata—which I am sure she has never read—also helped a little.

I have also tried various other means of getting over my experiences at Hidden Valley. Even prior to that sojourn, actually, I had several "remote healing" sessions with graduates of Barbara Ann Brennan's spiritual healing school, paid for half a dozen appointments with several different "Reiki Masters," and had a number of "healing sound" sessions with a therapist in Winnipeg. With all of that having no effect at all on me, of course: For all of my previous abilities to believe "six impossible things before breakfast," I've never been good at fooling myself into taking "expectation effects" as if they were real. That even goes back to the naturopathic muscle-testing, which I explicitly never trusted or found particularly convincing.

Until I got well into writing Stripping the Gurus in early 2004, though, I still thought that Yogananda was everything that he and SRF claimed him to be, and that it was just his organization that was a mess. And along with that, I still accepted all of his paranormal claims as to the existence of deathless Himalayan avatars and the like. (If I hadn't still been credulously believing all of that, I would never have, in mid-2002, entrusted my life's savings, as the sole investor for my first book, to a publisher who thinks that leprechauns are real. That is, if I hadn't still been thinking, at that point, that no one could be so deluded as to simply imagine such things and then take those imaginings as real ... I'd be $40,000 [Cdn., incl. interest] less poor right now.)

So, no surprise that I continued looking for auric healers who could actually do the work they claimed to be able to do, in clearing emotional energy blockages and the like.

Thus, the autumn of 1999 found me visiting a weekly gathering of prospective spiritual healers in Winnipeg, hoping for positive effects from their (free) efforts.

And guess what: In that context, one of the men ahead of me, shortly after sitting down with one of the handful of people doing healings, broke down and wept openly, obviously for having a lifelong emotional-energy blockage cleared.

"Ooh, I want that healer! He can really do the work! I want him!!" And as luck would have it, I did get the same five or ten minutes with him as "Weeping Man" did.

The mind, of course, is a powerful influence. In terms of one's own expectations of healing, I mean. For the actual, objective healing of another person, in the kind of thing which would pass double-blind testing ... not so much.

So, predictably, I again didn't feel a thing, inside or out, from that "healing."

Significantly, my reluctance to talk afterwards in the group about what I had "experienced" during that brief session was interpreted by the healers themselves as being due to something like my being "emotionally closed." They did encourage me, though, saying that I would gradually "open up" in future sessions. None of which psychobabble, of course, addressed the real reason for my reluctance, which was simply that there was nothing for me to talk about, in terms of the (non-existent) effects of their sincere efforts.

My last contact with any of these claimed healers came in mid-2001, after moving to Toronto, when I flew back to Winnipeg over a weekend for a $100 session with a highly recommended woman, there. She adjusted my aura, had me do a variety of visualizations, and was actually very impressive in her (non-paranormal) ability to tell whether I was "linearly focused" or "non-linearly visualizing."

Still, I again didn't feel a thing, inside or out, from all that ostensibly profound "energy work."

Finally, she placed her hands across from my stomach, and "directed energy" into the associated chakra.

"Can you feel that?" she said.

"No."

She moved her hands closer.

"Can you feel the energy now?"

Still no. Sorry, but I'm really not good at imagining things myself and then taking them as if they were real. Yes, I wasted more than a decade of my life taking other people's imaginings as if they were coherent statements of reality, but that's different. It's being credulous, gullible, daft, and the many other things which drive one's need to believe that there's more to life than just what is physically measurable, but it's still not the same thing as being unable to distinguish one's own imaginings from the real world. Reality, as they say, is the stuff which doesn't go away when you stop believing in it. For all of my past acceptance of other people's delusions, I've just never had difficulty with my own "reality-testing." That was true even when, as a child, I would get so lost in books that I'd forget I was even reading them, instead just seeing the action and hearing the characters' voices in my own mind, completely contented in that "inner world."

So finally, she placed her warm hands directly on my abdomen.

"Can you feel it now?"

Yes, I can feel it now. Body heat I can feel. That, at least, is real.

A couple of years earlier, shortly after my time in HV, I had a reading done by a highly recommended trance medium of my family's acquaintance. The kind, elderly woman in question claimed to be able to receive, from her spirit guides, the winning numbers for lottery tickets; and I had reason, based on other people's credulous testimony, to believe that she was telling the truth. Indeed, one could beat that lottery system on a regular basis only through "inside information," e.g., via clairvoyance. (Of course, I have since come to realize that if one were to have an undisclosed source of funds, one could purchase large quantities of tickets, and simply discard the non-winning ones, thus giving the impression....)

Bottom line: if she wasn't "real" as a medium, probably no one was.

On the day of the reading, the spirit purportedly speaking through her in that trance said that he was "99% certain" that my grandfather would be dead by the coming Christmas.

"He" also said that someday I'd "have everything I wanted," and that I'd "never be out of work." Indeed, there were apparently two jobs already lined up for me, with the first being a "stepping stone" to the second.

More intriguing, he saw me working at one of those future positions "down south, by the water," with a very slim, very long-haired woman, with near-ivory skin, who "enjoys getting things done almost as much" as I do, and who would respect and depend heavily on me in that context. And there was a chance, he said, that the woman in question and I would be more than just friends....

That was in the summer of 1999. Needless to say, I have not consciously or intentionally done anything to mess up that projected golden future.

Nevertheless, my grandfather lived for another four and a half years beyond that point, passing away in early 2004, in his mid-nineties. Hardly unpredictable—old people die, eventually.

I was unemployed from mid-2003 until early 2006—a period of two and a half years, during which I lived off of credit cards, and wrote Stripping the Gurus.

And I'm still waiting to meet that spectacular woman.

You've got to believe in something, right?

2. We're also curious about what produces the "guru-addicted personality." Can you speculate a bit about those you've met that might fall into this description?

I was looking online for some additional "help" in answering this question—since I'm definitely not a "guru-addict" myself!—and was surprised to find how little information, even just in speculation, I could turn up.

I found one psychoanalytic book which reasonably related the insistence that "one's personal guru is infallible"—a slightly different, but certainly not unrelated, issue—to the "longing for an omnipotent caregiver" or "wonderful Other." But then it went on to cite, as one of only two examples of that, how "more than 900 people willingly drank cyanide rather than face the fact that their leader, Jim Jones, had blundered." (That same book, by the way, was feted as being one of "the best psychodynamic resources" available, and "an ideal text for serious students of psychoanalytic approaches to psychopathology.")

Of course, the people who drank the cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid in Guyana actually did so at gunpoint, after months of sleep-deprivation, malnutrition, and "false alarms" regarding a supposedly impending violent attack on them. And if you read Deborah Layton's Seductive Poison you will find that many of them would have left the isolated, guarded community had they only possessed the means to do so: They knew Jim Jones wasn't the "savior" they had once believed him to be. Even the followers who lived in the nearest town in a group house, after all, refused Jones' order to drink.

Then, I came across some thoughts from one of Sai Baba's former followers, which I think are accurate as far as they go:

"People who desperately need to be under protective guidance are ready to surrender their critical thinking and moral autonomy to gain inner peace. It seems to me that it might be a similar psychological mechanism to chemical drugs. The reasons for people becoming drug addicted might be very similar to the reasons for becoming guru-addicted."

So, I went to Wikipedia to clear up my understanding of what "addiction" in general is:

"Addiction is not a disease but rather a habitual response and a source of gratification and security that can be understood only in the context of social relationships and experiences.... Addiction is characterized by the repeated use of substances or behaviors despite clear evidence of morbidity secondary to such use.... Addiction is often applied to compulsive behaviors other than drug use, such as overeating or gambling.... In all cases, the term addiction describes a chronic pattern of behavior that continues and is perceived to be hard or impossible to quit at any time.... Addiction is often characterized by an ongoing effort to use more (drug or behavior), tolerance, and withdrawal symptoms in the absence of the stimulus. Many drugs and behaviors that provide either pleasure or relief from pain pose a risk of addiction or dependency.... Instead of an actual physiological dependence on a drug, such as heroin, psychological addiction usually develops out of habits that relieve symptoms of loneliness or anxiety. As the drug [or behavior] is indulged, it becomes associated with the release of pleasure-inducing endorphins, and a cycle is started that is similar to physiological addiction. This cycle is often very difficult to break."

The dependency of many devotees on their gurus (and pandits) would obviously fit closely with many of those criteria.

I then started to further wonder whether there was any difference between "guru-addicted personalities" and "religion-addicted" ones in general. And I couldn't see how there could be. On the contrary, it seems to me that members of both groups suffer from exactly the same excessive need for social sanction for their beliefs, tendency to elevate people they admire to "infallible hero" status, need for acceptance from their then-great heroes, and need to belong to a "saved" in-group. The psychological comfort (and yes, endorphins) which one's meeting of each of those needs confers would have to be the same in both groups.

Whether you're one of Jehovah's "Chosen People" or one of Sun Myung Moon's comparable selected few obviously makes no difference in terms of the psychological dynamics involved in that "specialness." Likewise, you may be safe in an ashram from the demonic maya outside; safe in the Catholic Church from the influence of Satan "out there," at least so long as you confess your every mortal sin (including masturbation) on a regular basis; safe in Jonestown from the "snipers" in the surrounding jungle; or safe in a "second-tier" institution from the "attacks" of the purported 98% of the world which is "first-tier"—and which supposedly cannot, even in principle, understand you, until its ("Mean Green") members evolve to your own high perspective. In all of those cases, you will have the same need for a "safe sanctuary," even if the intensity of fear you feel at those mostly-imagined "persecutions"—and the corresponding degree of "protective" closure of the community from outside influences and questioning—may differ.

Whether or not the organization is led by a living guru makes little difference in either of those (specialness and felt safety) regards.

The fact that the cult-studies and cult-exit-counseling fields are brimming with persons who were born into "safe" religions, left those to join reportedly destructive cults, and then returned to the religions of their youths, only substantiates those points. Worse, it simultaneously skews the perspectives and theories of those same fields.

Look at it this way: Cult leaders, if they deign to formulate theories as to what a cult is, will invariably set up those criteria so that their own group isn't at risk of being categorized as a cult—being either blind to their own abusive manipulations, or deliberately overlooking or suppressing those. In exactly the same way, the leaders in cult studies cannot bring themselves to admit that the same weaknesses which made them susceptible to becoming psychologically "trapped" in one or another recognized cult are also what brought them back to the "safe" religions of their childhood.

Cult-studies professionals who themselves have been through reportedly destructive groups typically like to imagine that they would never have believed that their leaders there were "Saviors of Humanity" or the like had they not been "brainwashed" (i.e., coercively persuaded) into accepting that perspective through deliberate manipulation on the part of the community leaders. (They also tend to emphasize how persons will get involved with destructive groups at low and vulnerable points in their lives, neglecting to note how the need for meaning in life can be felt just as strongly when one is "on top of the world," and yet still finds that there is something missing. Consider how the Beatles came into contact with the Maharishi ... and then followed that up with George Harrison's endless involvement with the Hare Krishnas and SRF even after his disillusionment with TM®, to the point of chanting "Hare Krishna" for protection from knife-wielding attackers even when such chanting only enraged his assailants.)

When such persons "escape" from one or another closed, destructive community, to be free to believe whatever they want, and then choose to believe that they're still one of the Chosen People, or that Jesus and Mary are everything they're claimed to be in salvational terms, they've just exchanged one set of fairy tales for another. Such people, I am convinced, are psychologically "addicted" to religion every bit as much as are others who complete the Yogananda-Sai Baba-Ammachi cycle, for example, obviously feeling the need to have an "all-knowing, divine" guru in their lives, whatever the specific reasons and motivations may be for that.

If religion (even in its "alternative" forms) is indeed the opiate of the masses, it comes complete with its own (existential, social and biological [re: endorphins]) withdrawal symptoms, to keep you hooked—all of which is basically implied even just by Voltaire's statement that if God (and "perfect gurus") didn't exist, we would (and do) create them. "Even if my present guru turns out to have feet of clay, the next one will be the real thing"; even if all the religions I've been a member of are false, there's a true one out there somewhere, etc.

And, since the guru nearly always frames himself as being the source of all the good feelings one initially had in his presence, and as the divinely ordained channel for all bliss-experiences and enlightenment, there is powerful incentive to keep going back for more, even if getting your hits from a different "dealer." (And if you don't think that meditation, like drugs, can function as a form of escapism, think again.)

As to people I've met who would fall into the "guru-addicted personality" category, there is one in particular, and it actually makes me quite sad to think about it. Because he was, and is, one of the most all-around exemplary individuals I've met in my life—you couldn't meet this person, be the least bit sensitive to such things, and not recognize that there was something very unique, in a very good way, about him. If I had to list "near-saints" I've met in my life—people who were simultaneously strong, tender, compassionate and trustworthy—only two or three come to mind, and he's one of them.

We both ended up in Toronto after our respective, overlapping HV stays; he got in touch with me through my website; and we got together several times after that, exchanging Christmas greetings and going for walks in the park together. He had, by his own testimony, even been "attacked" by other SRF members for his suggestion to them that the current organization is less than perfect, and was correspondingly very tolerant of my own attempts at exposing the psychological abuses there, even though he would undoubtedly have (naïvely) wished to rehabilitate the group rather than destroy it.

I sent him an email regarding the release of Stripping the Gurus (with its gathering of the existing dirt on Yogananda) back in April of 2005. I haven't heard from him since, and would be surprised if that's a coincidence: To him, even if the organization is fraught with reported abuses and cover-ups, Yogananda is still, and will always be, everything which he and his organization claimed him to be. So, Babaji the "deathless Himalayan avatar" is real, Yogananda's ability to walk on fire was an outcome of his high spiritual state (as he claimed) rather than of known laws of physics, and everything narrated in the Autobiography of a Yogi must have happened exactly as the guru presented it. Because if it isn't true, the guru was lying; and the guru doesn't lie. Ever. On the contrary, all good things in your life come from him.

As one song which the good Christian waitresses at the lodge used to sing "around the campfire" put it, "If there's anything good/That happens in life/It's from Jesus." Or from Yogananda. Or Sai Baba.

Same shit, different pile, as they say back on the farm.

The "integral tuna" parody was indeed brilliantly done, in part because it insightfully anticipates so much of what would, logically, be the next steps in Ken Wilber's personal and professional dis-integration. (One almost hopes that the writer hasn't given kw too many "new ideas" about how to close off his community from questioning, there. On the other hand, though, by anticipating those very same behaviors, perhaps he has helped to prevent them, or at least to open the eyes of Wilber-ites to them. Time will tell.)

The thing about parody, though, is that if one does it "too well," without sufficient deviation from reality, it may well be taken even by informed persons as being the real thing, where one could easily imagine the character in question saying everything that was fictitiously attributed to him. (And even moreso, if the person being satirized is somewhat ... shall we say, "unconstrained," to begin with. As someone who has had very close contact with kw in I-I put it, "After all—he easily could have said all that!") That was true of Neil Innes' "Cheese and Onions," when performed on Saturday Night Live as a purported new song from John Lennon; it is true even of something like Wilber's self-parodying "Wyatt Earpy" series.

KW imagines that he was working there to separate his first-tier critics and followers from the second-tier ones. Really, though, all that that blogging ever actually did was to hew so close to his own normal and expected behaviors, and to what one would genuinely expect the next stages in his cult-leader discombobulation to be—as he later confirmed, too unwittingly, via the unthinking quotes from his "loyal, second-tier" ass-lickers—that even ex-founding members of I-I were left feeling that he was simply "losing it."

That of course has little, if anything, to do with second-tier supposedly being able to see past the "offensive" words to the (vacuous, utterly lacking, bullshit-artist) rebuttals to his critics presented by Wilber and his own raging shadow. Rather, for those of us who were taken in by his initial post, believing it to be "real," the problem was simply that it didn't depart sufficiently from what we already knew he was capable of, particularly given the context in which it was presented.

Thus, when the generally cotton-headed members of I-I cottoned on to kw's "trick" prior to its release, it wasn't because they were more insightful than the rest of us. Rather, they simply couldn't believe, based on the persona he had previously showed them, that he would be capable of such nonsense, so they had that additional, important "clue" to work from. For those of us who already knew better, it was not so easy to tell that it was all a "test." (Truly, then, the "Wyatt Earpy" series did act to separate those who will never actually realize what Wilber is up to, for thinking far too highly of him, from those who can indeed think for themselves.)

So, too, for the "integral tuna" parody, as over-the-top as some of the aspects of it ("integral salad," "canned tuna," "tomorrow's multi-grain or integral bread," "paint job from the fire hose of Spirit") may appear on a sober, second reading. After all, given the "purple"-meme nature of Wilber's prose to begin with....

Another aspect of that parody's excellence, as the author himself has noted, is that you can read it either from a pro-Wilber perspective or an anti-Wilber one, and it tells you "what you want to hear" either way. Go ahead, try it: If you've seen through kw's charade by now, read it as if you were a "true, integral believer." Doesn't it say exactly what you'd like to hear from Kensho, in terms of real science and those pesky details not being applicable from a third-tier perspective, in which you already "know" that the claims about higher realities and psi phenomena are true? Or, if you're an integral believer, and thus had already read it that way the first time around, now read it from a skeptical perspective, as a "confirmation" of what you had already suspected about kw's anti-scientific claptrap and willingness to change the rules when they don't suit him. Still fits, doesn't it?

See, taking multiple perspectives like that is what "being integral," to the extent to which it has more value than a plug nickel, is really all about. Isn't it? :)

In any case, I am pleased to present another piece, from the same highly skilled author of the "integral salad" and "second-tier tuna" essay, regarding the exploits of our favorite integral hero:

Spring Branch High School-itis

Konrad (Kon) Schwilber making a guest appearance at Spring Branch High School. Unfortunately for Kon, among the 300-plus in the auditorium is seventeen-year-old senior Victoria Maria Martinez. (Victoria's parents died tragically in a plane crash when she was only four. She was raised by her grandparents, Dario and Maria Martinez—Ph.D. chemist and Ph.D. musicologist, respectively—who always encouraged [and aided her in developing] critical thinking and freedom of expression.)

John Gilbert (16, sophomore): Mr. Schwilber, I think I read somewhere or somebody told me that you misrepresent Darwin's or neo-Darwin theory of evolution in your writings. I think you said that half a wing serves no function and therefore makes no sense, or something like that...

KS: Folks, give me a break on this one. I have a Master's degree in biochemistry, and a Ph.D. minus thesis in biochemistry and biophysics—

VMM: Excuse me Mr. Schwilber, my name is Victoria Maria Martinez and I've never heard of a Ph.D-minus-thesis. Is this a type of degree that you will offer at Integral University?

KS: Hi Victoria, that's actually a great question, but before I answer that I'd like to just unpack a few things here if I may. But before I do that I'd just like to ask you a couple of questions: one is are you concentrating in some particular field here at Spring Branch? And two is, have you read any of my books?

VMM: I don't know if you could call it "concentrate" in the same way you would in a university setting as in a major or minor, but my electives have been in foreign languages, science and art. And no sir, I haven't read any of your books. But to my knowledge there is no such thing as a Ph.D-minus-thesis. I'm sorry if I'm translating or interpreting you wrongly, but did you mean that you dropped out of graduate school or the doctoral program? I am very interested in the way different people and languages word things or express themselves. I'm familiar with the concept and application of the euphemism and I was just wondering if that's what you are doing. I don't want to sound presumptuous, but if this is what you are doing by saying Ph.D minus-thesis, isn't that a bit misleading? I mean, I have three months left here at Spring Branch. If I drop out now, do you think that Yale will accept me saying, I have a high school diploma minus the diploma? Wouldn't they ask me why I dropped out? I'm not so sure it's a good message to send to young people. And I don't mean dropping out. I mean, if I dropped out, why wouldn't I just say I dropped out unless I was trying to "cover my tracks" as my grandfather would say? or make it look different than it is? I don't get it. Is it a spade or a heart?

KS: Well, that's why I say, Victoria, if you'll just allow me to unpack a few things first. You see part of thinking integrally is something that we call AQAL, and basically this means that there are a lot of different ways of looking at things, different perspectives, and I'll get back to your question, but it's important that you understand a few things first, that you have a context, and I think you will find this way cool—

Tom Kaufmann (18, senior): Dude! Come on man! Answer her question. Do you think we haven't seen enough politicians or charismatic preachers on TV to know how a dog and pony show begins? Dude, it's 2006! What are you going to do now? Wow us with something that you've repeated six thousand times and make it sound like you are just thinking off the top of your head? And by the time you get back to answering Victoria's question we'll be so mesmerized and amazed at the way you sound that we'll all drop out because we feel like such idiots? Are you gonna sing us a song?

Principal Freeman: Tom that's inappropriate. That's enough of that. Please everyone, let's show Mr. Schwilber some respect and let him talk.

KS: Like I was saying, I did my thesis on the photoisomerization of rhodopsin in bovine rod outer segments. I know evolutionary theory inside out, including the works of Dawkins et al. The material of mine that is being quoted is extremely popularized and simplified material for a lay audience. Publicly, virtually all scientists subscribe to neo-Darwinian theory. Privately, real scientists—that is, those of us with graduate degrees in science who have professionally practiced it—don't believe hardly any of its crucial tenets. Instead of a religious preacher like Dawkins, start with something like Michael Behe's Darwin's Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. And then guess what? Neo-Darwinian theory can't explain shit. Deal with it—

VMM: I'm sorry, Mr. Schwilber, for interrupting but I'd like to "deal with" what you've just said, if you don't mind. Or I guess, to use the language you used a little earlier, to "unpack" a few things. You say you did in fact do a thesis, so I'll have to assume this was a graduate thesis and not a Ph.D thesis. And then you conclude by this (and I mean by saying that you have a Ph.D. minus-thesis and graduate thesis in photoisomerization), that you know evolutionary theory inside out. But that still doesn't make sense to me. Did you do a graduate thesis on "evolutionary theory"? Or are you saying that anyone who does a graduate thesis on photoisomerization knows evolutionary theory inside and out? Then a little further on you say, "those of us with graduate degrees in science who have professionally practiced it—don't believe hardly any of neo-Darwinian theories' crucial tenets." But you have said you write "extremely popularized, simplified material for a lay audience." I don't see how that constitutes working professionally in a field, and doing graduate studies is not the same as working professionally in a field. So I don't understand how you can say to us something like, "virtually all" scientists subscribe to neo-Darwinian theory in public, but "real" scientists would never do such a thing in private. And you make it sound like you are one of the "real" scientists. Are you saying that if someone is not a "real" scientist that they are embarrassed to publicly admit that neo-Darwinian theory doesn't work and if you are a "real," professional scientist that you say things like, it doesn't explain shit. As in nothing?

Principal Freeman: Please, Victoria, let Mr. Schwilber finish.

KS: The extensive problems with evolutionary theory as it now stands is exactly why "creation science" has made huge inroads across the country, including standing up in court cases where scientific evidence is brought in on both sides.

VMM: I'm sorry Mr. Freeman, but my grandparents would kill me if they knew that someone made a statement like that and I just simply agreed with it because they had a name. I have to speak out here to Mr. Schwilber. Mr. Schwilber, in government class we've had many discussions about the political power of the religious right. And we've also talked about what heavily funded lobbies and lawyers are capable of taking to court and how the system can be tied up for years and even beaten sometimes. I would ask you what is really more plain, that the religious right has strong lobbying and political power by virtue of how ardently they are willing to defend their beliefs (no matter what they are and no matter what they attack with all the time, effort and money they can throw at it), or is it that the neo-Darwinian theories are so full of holes that even the religious right won't accept them?

KS: Yes, well, the problem is that creation scientists—who are almost entirely Christians—after having convincingly demonstrated that neo-Darwinian theory has loopholes large enough to drive several Hummers through—then try to prove that Jehovah is in one of the Hummers. But, of course, the fact that neo-Darwinian theory cannot explain the central aspects of evolution, does not mean that a specific type of God can. But they never would make the kind of headway they have unless neo-Darwinian theory is the piece of Swiss cheese that it is.

VMM: Do you really believe that? Do you really believe that the only reason that the fundamentalist religious right makes "headway," as you call it, is because the things they attack are like Swiss cheese? I'm sorry, Mr. Schwilber, I may only be in high school, but that just doesn't make sense to me. I think your logic here is flawed. I don't mean to sound disrespectful, but if I forced myself to follow your line of thinking, I wouldn't feel very good about myself. I would have to deny things that seem obvious and accept things that sound good, but are, in my opinion, misleading and lack the evidence to show otherwise.

KS: Look Victoria, all that this really proves, in my opinion, is that there is an Eros to the Kosmos, an Eros that scientific evolutionary theory as it is simply cannot explain. But overall integral theory doesn't hang on that particular issue.

VMM: Thank you, Mr. Schwilber. I can live with that. You said, "in my opinion." And I think opinions are well and fine, but I don't think we should mistake our opinions for evidence that proves or disproves things. If the religious right would take more of this attitude, I think we would all be better off. But that is just my opinion. Are you fundamentally religious, Mr. Schwilber? Do you have religious beliefs that are so strong that you would like them to be more than opinions?

KS: Victoria, listen, if physicalistic, materialistic, reductionistic forces turn out to give an adequate explanation to the extraordinary diversity of evolutionary unfolding, then fine, that is what we will include in integral theory.

VMM: Yes, Mr. Schwilber, that sounds wonderful, but what concerns me is that if your presentation to us today reflects the way that thinking "integral" is, I'm not sure you would be capable of accepting these "forces" of science, as you call them, no matter how much proof you were given. Not necessarily because it isn't true but because, like the religious right, your mind is already made up. And if you already have very strong religious beliefs that mean a lot to you, the chances of you being able to accept such a thing whole-heartedly and intelligently are not very good. At least, that's what we learned in our overview of developmental psychology in coach Harding's social-science class. People that have strong religious beliefs like you seem to have a very strong drive to make amazing and grand apologies to make things fit into their world view, even when they are very intelligent.

Mr. Freeman: Victoria, please. Don't be insulting. It's not grown up.

KS: It's okay, Mr. Freeman, I can handle this. I'm no stranger to being insulting, I mean insulted. Victoria, first off, I forgive you for what you've said, so we can move on, but I will add that if you want to throw away your life with such a limiting way of seeing the world, that's your prerogative. But if you want to be part of an elite 2% of people in the world that know better, I would think twice. And in our opinion the 'nots' (not believing neo-Darwinian theory and believing in Eros) have it by a staggeringly huge margin, and scientists when they are not bragging to the world, whisper this to themselves every single day of their lives. I know, I lived in that community for the better part of a decade. And it's truly fascinating, to say the least....

VMM: I'm sorry Mr. Schwilber, you're whispering. I can't hear you. Did you say that you are bragging to the world that you are fascinating to say the least?

KS: No Victoria, what I said was don't go claiming that I don't know evolutionary theory, because in this particular instance anyway, you are absolutely off your nut.

Mr. Freeman: Okay everyone, I regret to say that our time is up. We'd like to thank Mr. Schwilber for coming and for NOT pantomiming masturbation and NOT asking randomly for students to give him blow jobs.

If you are not laughing your guts out right now ... you are probably "part of an elite 2% of people in the world" who are truly "integral." Or, at least, truly "wilber-esque."

I just received this email, through Frank Visser, regarding the previous Integral Tuna Casserole posting:

I asked Ken about the message Falk posted yesterday [i.e., on August 18], and Ken says he didn't say any of that.

Indeed, I now have confirmation from the author of the piece that it was, in fact, just a brilliant parody ... notwithstanding that it hits Wilber's anti-scientific attitudes and slipperiness right on the bald, shiny head, with at least an order of magnitude more skill than kw ever brought to his own Wyatt Earpy "tests."

In all seriousness, when a set of ideas won't stand up to questioning, or mesh with anything resembling real science, all you can really do to maintain your authority is to disallow those "skeptical" perspectives. And one effective (if manipulative) way of doing that would be exactly to explicitly define one's "enlightened" state of consciousness as seeing things far more clearly than "materialistic science" is able to, with the "promissory note" that the future evolution of the species will show one's second- or third-tier perceptions/delusions to be correct. So, if kw hasn't explicitly done that yet, don't be surprised if, sometime in the relatively near future....

Nevertheless, and even though I covered my own ass about all that in explicitly saying that it was only a "claimed" transcription of a recording of a talk given by Wilber, I do apologize to him for having posted that. (Though my comments on it still stand, generically.) After all, there is enough that is provably wrong with his ideas that no one needs to misrepresent them or otherwise make things up in order to show him to be an utterly out-of-control fool. (Seriously.)

Now, if he will only equally apologize for, and retract, his hundred-times-worse behaviors and claims which, to anyone with eyes to see, have deeply invalidated his life's work, throughout.

Naw, that ain't gonna happen. The "skillful means" of discrediting others and of separating first-tier from second-tier are still "all good," right?

First, he thanked me for my efforts in the "difficult task" of keeping kw on the "straight and narrow" these days. He then expressed his unsolicited, "informed" opinion that Wilber's writings were a good thing, for introducing people to alternative/esoteric spiritual paths and practices, but also voiced his sadness that kw's "shadow" was permeating his recent attempts to go beyond mere panditry in his leadership (which it is, blatantly), thus unfortunately (!) limiting his influence on others. (Roughly the same absurd rationale there as kw once used to defend Adi Da, as if limiting the spread of the ideas was a bad thing! For myself, the one good thing I would say about Wilber's "planned meltdown" is that it's been retarding the spread of his bullshit.) And, all of that was given to me "strictly off the record."

Understand this much: If you're going to be sending me unsolicited foolishness such as that, don't tell me it's "off the record," when people around you are throwing their lives away on obvious cult-membership. At least have guts enough to stand up and do the right thing, even if it costs you sales or respect in the spiritual community, huh?! I don't have time for self-interested New Age cowards who won't learn, but who still insist on "teaching" me. Pull shit like that on me again, and you should not be surprised to find your name "in lights," here. Consider yourself warned: You have no expectation of privacy if you waste my time with nonsense like that.

For that matter, when it comes to timid "off the record" (or less) concerns while people are wasting their lives on a set of obvious deceits: Where are the open letters (posted on Integral World would be fine) from Huston Smith, James Fadiman, Stanley Krippner, and any other "seekers of Truth" who have ever endorsed Wilber's ideas, to now distance themselves from him and his behaviors, and publicly acknowledge and apologize for their previous gullibility? Where is the integrity of these people?! Bauwens, Dallman, and others, have already showed guts enough to do the right thing, in that regard; why can't these other "great people" do the same? (Oh yeah, I forgot: They have far too much to lose by admitting that they were wrong from the start.)

Anyone who has been intensely interested in kw's ideas in the recent past, and who actually has a head on his or her shoulders and even a marginal interest in truth and reality, will by now already have seen through Wilber's deceits; it's all just too obvious for anyone with even half a clue to miss. So he has, through his "Wyatt Earpy" idiocy, succeeded in excluding from his community most of the people who would have actually been worth retaining, while keeping only/mostly the dregs who can't think for themselves ("ghastly display of non-thinking" is right) or properly "reality-test," there.

So, given that, one might even say, on a cynical day, "Not much lost."

But that professionally incompetent and/or dishonest Bald Bastard is going to be trying to sucker a whole new batch of people into the integral world, in his "Phase II" marketing. If you're laying any claim to conscience and integrity, and you can do anything to make others aware of the real nature of the Wilberian community, there is no choice: You have to do what you can to stop the growth of that cult, even if there are a hundred and one things you would rather be doing than spending time on that.

That's not just "first-tier complaining" about the world; rather, it's compassionately doing something about it. It's just that you're not doing what that Bald Fool thinks you should, in his dismally pre-rational and anti-scientific view of the world.

I've just been informed that some trancenet.org material has been shifted over to this new location: http://onwww.net/trancenet.org.

Very good news, that. You know, for those of us so "green" as to want to know the truth about the effects of meditation, and TM® in particular.

Update (8/23/2006): I have since been informed that "Ken says he didn't say any of" the alleged transcription, below.

Anyone that has hung out with us at I-I for more than a few hours knows clearly that what the world lacks is "being integral"—literally integral spirituality in action. It's that simple. What we are doing with Phase II at I-I is actually leading by example and lifting the world up in the process.

It's literally as if we will motor our way across what is now a flatland sea, in our 2nd tier ship (remember lines, levels, states and stages, and this is our ship of emptiness and its crow's nest is like this high, it's high isn't it? I mean I don't want to, you know, but come on, is it high or what?), and the ordinary or common person will be drawn up in the up-current of our wake and literally be transformed in that they will actually experience vertical stage-growth. And if you really think about this, about what we're actually doing here, it's just simply nothing short of astonishing. I mean I just don't know anywhere in the world, other than here, where you can get something like this. (And it's not like I haven't looked pretty darn hard over the last thirty years. I've done a lot of homework.)

So Phase II will literally be the phenomenon of an integral wake, created by a 2nd tier ship, built by 2nd tier pioneers and pilgrims, drawing up living, non-integral tuna, through lines, levels, states and stages in the vast sea of emptiness and transforming them into canned tuna—which in my opinion, anyway, will do nothing short of adding to the sublimity and nutritiousness of an already stout and exquisite integral salad. I mean, is this cool or what?

And this is really what integral is about. It's about lifting people up. It's about raising the consciousness of the world. And right now there are a lot of people that just don't get it. And like or not that's where we are, and that's what we need to deal with. We need to change it. It's that simple. And unlike 1st tier which likes to complain and do nothing, 2nd tier is not content to simply recognize problems or conditions and point them out. No, 2nd tier feels the suffering of the world in a deep and meaningful way and can't help but want to do something about it. They just simply cannot sit back and watch it.

I'm sorry and I know green won't forgive us for that, but it's just the way it is and there is a staggering and overwhelming amount of evidence that supports this ... if you know where to look. And this is what we're about. We've looked in the right places and we've come up with models that are so deeply rooted and supported with evidence [Piaget? Ha!] that it simply drives green crazy and they won't stop trying to drag it back down to a to a level of understanding that it simply can't and won't be squeezed into. It's like trying to fit into the shorts you wore when you were five years old. Does it work? I don't think so. And what happens when you try? You split them wide open. It's just simply astonishing and if you are awake, if you are someone that has actually evolved to 2nd tier, you will deal with this every day.

Let me give you an example. Suppose you are dealing with a controversial topic, a green-supposed-unverified topic (not actually unverified, but green-supposed-unverified like psi and psychic phenomena), in other words something that the materialistic, physicalistic, scientific community just refuses to see clearly because in their blind, conditioned zeal for Spirit-bashing they just won't acknowledge interiors (and I'm not saying this is a bad thing, it's not bad per se, it's just that it's not integral, you follow me? [Evidence for psi? Where? Dean Radin? Marilyn Schlitz? Wrong again.] It's not all levels all lines states and stages, AQAL ... and that's okay, we need their perspective, but it simply isn't an accurate, full or big picture of reality and we don't have to cow down to it, that's not what 2nd tier is about. 2nd tier is about having the courage to take it further even when you know you'll catch hell for it ... as we like to say, 'if you can't stand 1st tier heat, you just simply, and I mean categorically, should not be cooking in a 2nd tier kitchen.'

And believe me folks, if this hasn't happened to you yet it will. If you cook integrally, 1st tier will say, without exception, 'something smells funny.' And this is important to keep in mind when things get tough for you at yellow, or turquoise. What is nourishing and smells divine to 2nd tier, smells like shit, bull- or otherwise, to 1st tier, especially green, and that's okay. I'm not saying it's bad. I want to be clear on that. It's simply a stage distinction, it's stage specific and it's as predictable as the salivation you get from a Pavlovian dog when you ring the dinner bell. Everyone here know Pavlov? Know what I'm talking about? and I'll repeat that, they just refuse to see it clearly.

So what do they ask for? What do they want? Anybody? They ask for more evidence? Better evidence. More sound evidence. As if there were some end to it all. [One person who could sense auras or subtle energies, under simple, properly double-blinded conditions, would be a good start. Right now, the count stands at zero, worldwide.] They want research, and more research. And what does research take? Anyone? Money. It takes money.

But let's just look at this from a 2nd tier perspective for a minute. We know that things evolve, we're clear on that, we don't need to do any more research to know that things evolve, all things evolve ... by a form of Eros, we know that now, it's practically common sense, however you want to language it.

So let me ask you, would you use a wooden plow to plow your farm? Of course not, and why? Because things have evolved. Now, I want you to think about this before you answer, and I really want you to go into and feel the tug of your 2nd tier center of gravity. Okay. Now, if you already felt there was enough evidence, to your satisfaction and to the extended 2nd tier community of professionals around you (and look around you, these are not just some ordinary people that we've contracted here to grow our university), to prove something outright, 100 percent, beyond a shadow of a doubt, categorically, absolutely, no matter how seemingly questionable it might continue to be from the "outside 1st tier world" (I'm not saying they're bad, I'm just saying they don't know shit from Shinola). What would you do? What would you do if someone offered you money? Would you conduct further research? Would you work with a wooden plow? What would you do? Anyone? Well, I know what I'd do. I'd buy a fucking P.R. company!

And this is what 2nd tier does these days, and it's not that difficult to see why if you know where to look. And the first thing you have to do is recognize that things evolve, you have to see levels, lines, states and stages, AQAL, and when you recognize this you then look at the cutting edge of this evolution, which is obvious to anyone at yellow and completely obvious to anyone at turquoise, and you catch that frothy, fuzzy, leading-edge wave and you surf it.

You literally surf the frothy edge of a fuzzy wave and green just simply won't forgive you for it. You're out there surfing and they want you to sit on the beach and criticize the surfers. Why? Because they don't know how to surf. They want you to devolve to suit their picture of the world. They want you to do research until all results are predictable and verifiable under controlled conditions and why? Because that's what they are? They are what they see? They are Pavlov's dogs and they want everything to fit the classical conditioning mode and mind-set. The evidence for this is simply overwhelming. It's everywhere you look, if you know how to look, if your eyes are open ... and your heart is open. It's not just Big Mind. It's Big Mind and Big Heart working together. Are you with me?

So from 3rd tier when I looked back down at 2nd tier this all became very clear to me. Now I don't want to get too far ahead, but this is important and I'll just give you a little peek into sort of how my mind works and I want you to see how 3rd tier can look back down at 2nd tier. And this, by the way, is really remarkable and just astonishing and I hope that some of you or hell, even all of you, will experience this one day.

Anyway I just wanted to put that out there but I don't want to get too far ahead here. It's important that we work at 2nd tier, and continue to work at second tier, you simply cannot just jump to the next stage in the time we have, yes you can experience the state, a 3rd tier state, but it simply won't last (and there's just simply such a vast body of evidence that just screams out at us over this, it reeks to high heaven) and so we always have to keep in mind this difference between states and stages. I can't stress this enough. But I looked back down at 2nd tier and it was all very clear to me.

To pay too much attention to detail and be too rigorous in your research is simply by today's level of evolution a waste of time and money. And we all know that and the evidence for it is simply so pervasive that it hardly needs some sort of scarecrow propstand to scare away the vultures by showing them their own shadow. What is important is the image and how it is promoted and who is reached. Now green will simply not forgive that nor this next statement, not because they don't see the truth in it, but because their primitive need to be unendingly moralistic qua taking the high ground will simply not tolerate it, they can't stomach it, and I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I'm just saying that part of transcending and including is being able to swallow things, to stomach them, to make palatable what green can't, in other words to see the merit and benefit in accelerating the evolution of consciousness and uplifting the world in the integral wake, instead of floundering around endlessly in the green swamp until absolutely everybody is on board, stuffed and satisfied ... and the next statement is simply one word: MARKETING.

If you want to accelerate growth you must market. And of course to market integrally you have to use AQAL, I, we, it, etc. Interiors and exteriors, mezo- and meta-teriors. Do you all know about mezo- and meta-teriors? Oh gosh, don't get a writer started. I mean, I just zziiisuh! My next book has some really astonishing new additions to the AQAL and, okay, you'll just have to wait on that one ... this is really just so cool ... anyway....

So when green starts yelling, bad science, shoddy research, more evidence, blah blah blah, there is a simple 2nd tier mantra you can recite and even sing to keep you on track, if you feel like you are back-sliding, doubting or losing that exquisite sense of grace, vitality and alignment that comes with 2nd tier consciousness [i.e., losing your "integral salvation"], and it goes like this: "This inte(gral)-piggy went to market, this one-tier piggy stayed home, this orange piggy ate a roast beef, and this purple piggy had none, and this greeny piggy cried wee, wee, wee all the way home."

It's not rocket science folks, though I understand rocket science. I lived and breathed that stuff in that world for a better part of a decade. I know quantum mechanics inside and out, relativity, special and general, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, Heizi's Uncertainty and the whole shebang, I even know String theory now and I think it's nothing short of astonishing and right on. And believe me I've seen it all and it ain't pretty.

[Special relativity, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle are all taught, in their simplest forms, in sophomore physics. Special relativity can actually be derived from simple high-school algebra; it's a standard second-year exercise to do so. General relativity and its tensor mathematics are taught in junior/third year. I too have taken them all during my best-in-class years in honors physics, though I would certainly never claim to understand any of them at a professional level. Nor does kw understand them at anything close to that level, for what it's worth; he couldn't have so completely fucked up on David Bohm's ideas if he did. Not to mention that anyone who actually did know any of those theories "inside out" would be publishing in the peer-reviewed field. That, after all, is what deep knowledge of any discipline does: It "forces" you to come up with new ideas and to share those with others who have similar interests.]

It's just astonishing how great the vertical discrepancy between some of these people's cognitive level of development and these other lines that just simply will never catch up, are, and they are really doing the world a great disservice by endlessly demanding that their view is the best and only viable one. We just simply don't have to buy it anymore. And frankly, we won't (I'm not saying it's a bad thing, I'm just saying that it doesn't satisfy the integral model. And the integral model is a hungry beast that encompasses nothing less than infinity, the complete vast emptiness that all of us are. And don't let anyone sell you short on this. You are literally That).

Image is vastly more important than substance, and I just can't stress this enough. If art and music have taught us nothing more it is simply that. Marketing is replacing substance with image and this is how it should be. This is evolution of consciousness.... And with new integral marketing ... we suck a few more into the self-birthing, self-referencing rumination (and I mean that in the best possible sense) of the truly integral matrix, and through this process or processing they are uplifted. It's simply astonishing and utterly, unquestionably fascinating....

It sounds impossible, paradoxical and oxymoronic, but this is how the integral matrix works and if you are 2nd tier you know this. And this is why we need each and every one of you. Grist for the integral mill is already seen as tomorrow's multi-grain or integral bread, falling not like manna from heaven but synthesized from an integral consciousness and sprayed like a long-overdue and God knows desperately needed paint job from the fire hose of Spirit onto the walls of eternity, because to truly know integral is to know that the great and mysterious link between evidence and marketing is actually the disavowed, disowned and discarded pre/trans fallacy.

For in the suspension of disbelief, as we transcend and include, we re-absorb and re-integrate what can only be looked at as a new and improved, always and already improving, pre/trans fallacy, fresh, formless and wet from birth, molded integrally solid and purified in the crucible of integral kilns (the virtual autoclaves of the future) with the fire of Spirit (which has been so horribly abused, misused, kicked around, suffocated and oppressed for too long, but will nonetheless be revealed, healed, polished and preserved by our undying mission to let Spirit have its rightful seat that the traditions teach us it should) and this new improved pre/trans fallacy becomes the solid trans/phallic bow of our integral ship ever pioneering onward with a heart full of courage and undying love and commitment to uplift all of those that thirst for something more than what the tired old bloated belly of conventional, modern, post-modern and pre-post-pseudo-meta integral thought can offer, for all that have had even just a glimpse of the vast emptiness that is your true being, your true heart that reaches out to the infinite corners of the Kosmos and says I love you, I love me and I am simply astonished and amazed and I know I have something to give and to give it and to want to live from this space fully and artfully with the skillful means and a body to match (we don't want to neglect the physical) and maybe even abundantly with something to show for our own life for God's sake. This is what integral is and I don't know about you but I just think that it is so cool.

(Even if the above were merely a parody of kw, or another "Earpy test" from the integral world—another White Integral Night, as it were, just to separate the "second-tier" believers from the "first-tier" doubters—it would still, I think, state kw's wildly irrational, preachy position with frightening accuracy. Or do you find anything in the above that Kensho couldn't reasonably have said, given what you already know about him?)

Anyway, betcha the people at Skeptical Inquirer are feelin' pretty darn foolish right about now for having ever spoken positively of Wilber's hopelessly anti-scientific, irrevocably flawed, Velikovsky-like work, eh? Never mind about skeptics being able to co-exist, peacefully, with his followers! (If Elliot Benjamin, too, had even a glimmer of realization about what is going on beyond his own "truth" about kw, he would likewise be feeling like just about the biggest idiot on the face of the planet, right about now.)

"Integral Sadie, you made a fool of everyone...."

Really, if there were a God, Wilber could well be His gift to atheists: Can you imagine a more persuasive argument against taking anything in spirituality or religion seriously than kw has provided via his simultaneous "Great Realization," genius-level standing in the spiritual world—proving that his respected peers, too, uniformly cannot tell when they are being fed pure bullshit—and utter inability to get the simplest things right (in what is either regular academic dishonesty or gross incompetence on his part). I'm no atheist—"radical agnostic" suits me better—but really: How can you continue to take any of our world's religions or forms of spirituality seriously, after having seen what "the best," most integral, most inclusive, and most widely celebrated one has to offer? For anyone who cares to see, Wilber is not merely utterly destroying his own credibility, he's taking the rest of the spiritual world down with him! Changing the rules whenever they don't tell him what he wants to hear ("Details? We don't need no steenking details! Details are so first-tier!"), knowing that there will always be a loyal group of fools who will simply never figure out how much they are being continually deceived and clearly manipulated by him.

Um, and as far as people such as myself supposedly not knowing (spiritual) shit from Shinola: According to both Wilber's close friend Huston Smith and his former co-editors at The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (i.e., James Fadiman and Paul Clemens), I know the difference quite well. Even if I haven't received a supposedly bi-annual royalty check from that latter bastard, Clemens, in well over a year, now, in spite of having sunk $40,000 (Cdn., including interest) into that project as the sole investor. (That's what you get from these "seekers of Truth" when you turn skeptical as to the existence of leprechauns and the like, I assume.)

Here's what Clemens had to say about my understanding of spirituality and its many traditions, prior to freezing me out and refusing to even respond to my emails:

now I can say that I've 'proofed' the first 9 chapters so far,
and I'm both amazed and pleased how well you express even the most subtle
thoughts...
your logic is clear throughout, and frankly, your work presents
thoughts, comments, and connections so plausibly I can hardly imagine
anyone putting it all together with 'words' as you have done........ it will
take several readings to absorb half the wisdom there.
makes me just want to stop everything and just get enlightened before I
leave!!!

anyway, it's late, but I've been intending to tell you how
impressed I am with everything I've read so far....

So, aren't you glad I'm using my (now skeptical) understanding of spirituality for good (i.e., rational questioning) rather than for evil (i.e., blind/integral belief)?

Anyway, like all true quacks and cult leaders, kw quotes science and statistics when he thinks they support his view ... and then shits on them and their competent ("green"??!) practitioners when it turns out they don't! (Yes, I already "called" that back last October, ten months ago.)

And if Wilber really, truly is in possession of any reasonable proof that psi phenomena exist (he isn't), there is now, as always, a cool $million waiting for him in the JREF Paranormal Challenge. If he was even remotely interested in truth rather than in simply maintaining his high standing in the consciousness-studies world by bullshitting others 'til the integral cows come home, don't you think he might by now have submitted, if nothing else, his own claimed paranormal abilities (in subtle energies and brain-deadness) to those simple, foolproof tests? (Those same tests would require no financial outlay from him at all. Hell, there are probably even skeptics' groups in Denver who could do the initial testing, in preparation for the JREF.)

Or couldn't the Integral Institute use, not merely another million dollars, but all the free publicity which would accrue from that? Hell, with that prize kw could even dispense with his blessed "fucking P.R. firm": The P.R. would entirely take care of itself—Wilber wouldn't be able to stop the appearances on Oprah, Dr. Phil, the six-o'clock news, etc., even if he wanted to!

Knowledge of his "Integral Greatness" would flash, nearly instantly, beyond a few hundred thousand readers into the multi-millions, if not literal billions. As many people as have heard of Bill Gates, would have heard of, and then come to "believe in," Ken Wilber, his ideas, and his integral practice. He would be, the day his next royalty statements roll in from Shambhala, rich beyond the dreams of avarice. He'd be nearly fucking King of the World!

If, that is, what he had to offer you in his "integral philosophy" and personal claims to psi abilities was even remotely true. Which it isn't. Not even close.

You can see why Randi wouldn't have wanted to waste his time "chasing after" kw though, right? The guy is slippery as—to adapt a phrase from Wilber's own (alleged) limping, wanna-be-poetic imagery—an integral tuna; he just won't "play fair," by any standards of honesty or academic integrity. And such a small fish, too, in the eyes of the skeptical world.

And remember: I called the whole descent of Wilber's community into obvious cultitude, and the undeniable suppression of deep questioning and skepticism there, at each stage of its disintegration, well before it happened. (You can easily verify that via the previous entries on this same blog.) It was all, as they say, predictable as Pavlovian salivation (as opposed to Wilberian salvation).

And that was odd because, you know, unlike kw himself, I'm not even able to sense subtle energies, much less vacuously pretend to be "third tier." :) Still less am I so detached from reality as to dream up an entire book (Up from Eden) based merely on my own literal hallucinations (of which I, for the record, have had none, ever). Put bluntly: I'm not psychic (no one is), but I still saw this coming from a mile away.

One other thing: When I released STG over a year ago, I made the mistake of approaching the semi-incoherent doofus who runs this site with it. Got back voluminous emails full of unsolicited, trivial if not downright idiotic editorial suggestions for the improvement of my writing—e.g., I shouldn't be disparaging Yogananda as "portly," because it might offend the obese!—to the point where I simply started deleting them unread, and/or setting my email filters to do that for me.

'Cause I just don't have time for dysfunctional "help" like that. Not a year ago with STG, not now with NE. So, if you've recently been trying your best to "help" me in that regard ... I neither need, nor want, annoyances like that in my life. And I have, indeed, been auto-deleting them, unread.

I suppose, in the end, the Rutles said it best, in their stunningly brilliant parody of the Beatles' I Am The Walrus:

Hey diddle diddle
The cat and the fiddle
Piggy in the middle
Doo-a-poo-poo
A-poo-poo-poo

A purple integral poo, that is.

"Norman Einstein": The Dis-Integration of Ken Wilber is now online, in HTML and PDF, with a bound edition to follow ... sometime in 2007.

Since the anticipated "Pandits and Prisoners" chapter ended up being mostly about Zimbardo's study rather than the Integral Institute, I ended up not including that information.

"Makes a great Khristmas gift!"

In my inbox this morning, from the I-I mailing list:

Dear Friends,

You know well by now my devotion to the work of Integral Institute. At moments like this, when I reflect on all that has been accomplished in the last five years, I stand in awe. When I look back on the reasons we started I-I —to foster growth and the healthy _expression of development, to help unpack the expressive unfolding of Spirit, to create a place of belonging—I am deeply pleased to find that today this vision is being enacted, and ever so beautifully.

This little project of ours needs now to expand—to move, as we're calling it, from Phase I to Phase II. The Integral revolution is taking off all around us, and I-I is growing right along with it.

Only a few years ago, I-I consisted of 8 volunteers and semi-volunteers involved in a 'hyperdance' with me that barely managed to get off the ground. It wasn't easy, and we did it with love, passion, and an aversion to sleep. Since then we've grown to a dedicated team of 35, and you have seen the results of this growth first-hand. Phase I brought forth the seminars, the websites, the gatherings, the videos, the community, and some of the most interesting blogging on the planet.

Phase II will put all these remarkable accomplishments in a context where Integral consciousness can begin to reach a wider audience. As you may know, I-I is attracting more and more attention and doing bigger and brighter things, and we need to grow our organization to meet this new demand for our work.

Internally, Phase II will allow us to implement an Integral holarchy to run the day-to-day operations of I-I. We are using a model that is, I believe, truly revolutionary. I-I will lead by example, showing the world that the 2nd Tier organizations it so desperately needs are indeed possible.

Externally, Phase II will allow I-I to reach further into popular consciousness by deepening and expanding all the parts of the Multiplex, from Integral Training to Integral University to Integral Spiritual Center. Some of these changes have already begun, but others will require greater staff, greater expertise, and greater resources.

We kicked off Phase II with a major campaign that is already proving successful, working with key people to secure the $3M funding to finalize this transition. We are on our way to a brighter realization of this same vision, started so long ago, and we are creating a place for the Integral vision to grow, mature, and move out into popular consciousness, lifting everyone in its wake. The love and much-appreciated financial support coming from all of you, the Integral community, are nurturing and developing our vision for the next generation.

Please stay tuned in the upcoming weeks to find out what is happening here at I-I with Phase II. If you are interested in participating in Phase II, or have any comments for our staff please contact us at phase2@integralinstitute.org.

The Integral revolution has begun, and is continuing brilliantly onward, thanks to you, our community.

Love and Blessings,
Ken

It's almost as if the "Wyatt Earpy" cult-like manipulations by that grandiose, dishonest and/or professionally incompetent clinical narcissist never even happened, isn't it? As if the world needs a "second-tier cult" masquerading as an institute of learning!

And kw still thinks that the only reason anyone would harshly criticize his bullshit ideas is for resenting his ill-gotten success? What an idiot.

You say you want a [integral] revolution
Well, you know, we all want to change the world
You tell me that it's [Eros-driven, non-Darwinian] evolution
Well, you know, we all want to change the world

But when you talk about Wilberism
Don't you know that you can count me out

...
You tell me it's the [Integral] Institution
Well, you know, you better free your mind instead
'Cause if you're believing in Q-Links and Chairman Ken
And spouting postmodern, pre-rational bald nonsense
Don't you know it's gonna be ... second tier
Second tier, second tier
Second tier, second tier, second tier
Second tier, second tier, second tier

"Thanks to your continued loyalty, Integral comrades, the Wilberian revolution will continue marching brilliantly onward to its glorious conclusion." With, perhaps, 50-foot tall billboards of the Integral Dictator disgracing downtown Boulder? (And a five-year plan, even: "when I reflect on all that has been accomplished in the last five years....")

"Better dead than Integral."

In verifying the bibliography entries for the "Norman Einstein" book today, I saw this comment from a couple of months ago on Matthew Dallman's blog, contributed by a reader (Michael WithNoLastName) there:

Nor does [Wilber] take the generalisations [sic] that Falk (the only critic more witless than you.)talks [sic] about.

Huh? What "generalisations" do I talk about? (Maybe he's confused me with Jeff Meyerhoff's criticisms of kw's ineptly executed orienting generalizations? And perhaps "Michael" can't tell the difference between "Jeff" and "Geoff"? I wish I was joking. I'm not.) I deal in details. Specifics. Particular misrepresentations by the Bald Bastard of Boulder. Backed up by a multitude of specific direct quotes to document Wilber's false claims. It's called research.

As always, such Wilberian Idiots are the ones who can't get the simplest things right, or make even minimally coherent criticisms. Me, I get along with doing such things properly just fine, both in overarching principles and in details. And that, of course, is exactly why I could never fit in among courageous non-thinkers such as the semi-anonymous Michael in the integral community. "Alas."

P.S. While I have know-nothing Wilberites telling me that I'm "witless," I simultaneously have knowledgeable Ph.D.'s encouraging me to continue my "GREAT" debunking of Wilber's false claims and cult-leader manipulations. Life's funny, isn't it?

I had no idea that the best character songwriter in the country, Katharine Wheatley, had a new website up. Nor that she had recently played at a southern Ontario elementary school named after the spy codenamed "Intrepid" ... or that Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, modeled that character after the same Canadian spy.

Just goes to show ya.

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