Blog — December, 2007

An Apache myth, from Joseph Campbell's The Masks Of God: Primitive Mythology (p. 74-5):

[T]here was once a murderous monster called Kicking Monster, whose four daughters at that time were the only women in the world possessing vaginas. They were "vagina girls."

Hmm. So far, it sounds just like high school. Not where I went to high school; far from it. But maybe somewhere in High School USA.

Campbell continues:

And they lived in a house that was full of vaginas. "They had the form of women," we are told, "but they were in reality vaginas. Other vaginas were hanging around on the walls [?], but these four were in the form of girls with legs and all body parts and were walking around." As may be imagined, the rumor of these girls brought many men along the road; but they would be met by Kicking Monster, kicked into the house, and never returned. And so Killer-of-Enemies, a marvelous boy hero, took it upon himself to correct the situation.

Outwitting Kicking Monster, Killer-of-Enemies entered the house, and the four girls approached him, craving intercourse. But he asked, "Where have all the men gone who were kicked into this place?" "We ate them up," they said, "because we like to do that"; and they attempted to embrace him. But he held them off, shouting, "Keep away! That is no way to use the vagina." [!] And then he told them, "First I must give you some medicine, which you have never tasted before, medicine made of sour berries; and then I'll do what you ask." Whereupon he gave them sour berries of four kinds to eat. "The vagina," he said, "is always sweet when you do like this." The berries puckered their mouths, so that finally they could not chew at all, but only swallowed. "They liked it very much, though," declared the teller of the story. "It felt just as if Killer-of-Enemies was having intercourse with them. They were almost unconscious with ecstasy, though really Killer-of-Enemies was doing nothing at all to them. It was the medicine that made them feel that way.

"When Killer-of-Enemies had come to them," the story-teller then concluded, "they had had strong teeth with which they had eaten their victims. But this medicine destroyed their teeth entirely." And so we see how the great boy hero, once upon a time, domesticated the toothed vagina [i.e., vagina dentata] to its proper use.

Well, maybe. But I still say that Vagina Dentata was an unreleased album by The Police. You know, somewhere between Regatta De Blanc and Zenyatta Mondatta.

So, I think I've said about all that can be said for this year. Goodnight.

Thankfully, it's still on the Vomiting Confetti blog, but there's no link from there to the original posting.

And searching for "Behe" on the Integral Naked Forum doesn't bring it up. In fact, all of the posts there seem to be only from sometime in 2006, onwards. Apparently it's an "old forum" vs. "new forum" thing. (I suppose I'm the last one to know about that.)

Kazlev had preserved the link to the once-active thread: http://integralnaked.org/forum/tm.asp?m=37376. But it no longer exists on the IN site ... or apparently anywhere else on the Internet.

This appears to be all that's left of that whole exchange on the whole 'Net. Not much help to me, though, since a lot of the top pages are from my websites. :(

Well, you can now Search Inside Adi Da's The Knee of Listening. With a new Foreplay ... I mean, Foreword ... by none other than the "Wilber of Ramakrishna studies," Jeffrey Kripal. (What, Ed Kowalczyk wasn't available to fellate Da Master?)

Really, Kripal fucks with his sources just as badly as Wilber does, to the same overwhelming degree of incompetence. Yet, he didn't want me to use any quotes from his Kali's Child in STG, because the issues with "pederastic love" and gurus fuckin' their disciples were supposedly "infinitely more complex" (his phrases) than he thought I had presented in STG. Of course, that judgment by Kripal was based only on his reading of the cover-copy and Table of Contents from the book, not any of the text, not even the friggin' Introduction!

No joke: The guy's a total fucking idiot, who shouldn't be gainfully employed anywhere in academia; no less for now endorsing Da's work:

In my opinion, this latter total corpus constitutes the most doctrinally thorough, the most philosophically sophisticated, the most culturally challenging, and the most creatively original literature currently available in the English language.

Geez, where have we heard that crap before?

The Dawn Horse Testament is the most ecstatic, most profound, most complete, most radical, and most comprehensive single spiritual text ever to be penned and confessed by the Human Transcendental Spirit.

Yep, kw's words. These dangerously stupid, academically incompetent "experts" just never fucking learn.

Anyway, came across this, from Da's Knee:

Th[e] Process (of the inner perceptual un-"Veiling" of the hierarchical structure, pattern, and contents of the conditionally manifested body-mind-self, or body-brain-self) Culminates (or may Culminate—at least eventually) in the vision (in occasion, or, otherwise, constant, Savikalpa Samadhi) of the "blue bindu" (or the "blue pearl"—as well as the various other objectified inner lights, such as the red, the white, and the black—described by Baba Muktananda)—or even the vision of the total Cosmic Mandala (of many concentric rings of color, including the central "blue bindu," with its Brilliant White Five-Pointed Star at the Center—as I have Described It).

w00t! I used to compose sentences just about that layered and convoluted.

But then I learned how to write.

I was re-reading Steven Dutch's Spectacularly Stupid Commentaries on September 11, 2001. From which:

Probably it wouldn't do much harm to hire former dropouts who had established a good work record [to work as airport security checkers]. But what really elevates Balzar's [Los Angeles Times] column from the mundane to the sublimely stupid is this passage:

About one-quarter of our young people drop out of high school, according to the National Center for Education ... Are they all incompetents? All incapable of responsibility? Are they all stone stupid?

This one is easy. Yes to all the above. Start with stupid. Consider someone living in a high tech society that provides twelve years of free education, but drops out because of lack of interest or motivation or because of peer pressure, or makes a lifestyle choice like getting arrested, addicted or pregnant that prevents the student from completing an education. What part of stupid doesn't apply here? What reason is there to suspect any such person is capable of responsibility? Incompetent speaks for itself. Even someone who does complete high school is marginally qualified to function in society; someone who drops out simply lacks the competence to do anything useful. 

In a complex society like ours, nobody at all needs unskilled, unmotivated workers. Some dropouts may prove themselves later on. But until then, we have every reason to consider them stupid, irresponsible, and incompetent.

And what about our immigrants, those people with the gumption to get here but maybe not the pedigree it took to get into high school back home?

Balzar deliberately muddles the discussion by lumping together people who lacked the opportunity to attend school through no fault of their own versus those who had it but turned it down through their own selfishness and arrogance.

Different parents, different luck, some dropouts would have gone on to college.

Note the complete lack of reference to personal responsibility. With different parents I'd have been in line for the British throne or had a billion dollars. So what? We have to play the hand we're dealt.

We can't trust these people? Then how come we give them driver's licenses?

Good question. I personally believe you shouldn't get one until you have a high school diploma. It might help provide relevance to those who find education "irrelevant."

Thomas Edison never even started high school. Dave Thomas, the celebrated Wendy's hamburger entrepreneur who died Tuesday, never finished.

More apples and oranges. Comparing the situation of people who were of school age decades ago and longer with that of present-day dropouts is flat-out historical illiteracy. It's preposterous to compare people who dropped out of school because of economic necessity years ago with those who drop out for the frivolous reasons of today's dropouts (yes, I define high-school sex, drugs, peer pressure, lack of motivation or interest, and crime as frivolous reasons). Besides, Edison's lack of education showed more than once in his failure to follow up on observations that might have led to inventions that were later made by others....

What unites both these columns is the notion that true freedom entails freedom from consequences, and that society has an obligation to remove adverse consequences for dumb decisions.

Dutch's rant about "Self-Appointed Experts" is also worth periodically re-reading. As are his ideas on political reform:

Suggested remedy: electronic balloting. Before you vote, you have to answer ten questions picked randomly from the questions asked of prospective new citizens. Less than eight correct, your vote doesn't count.

And this:

The fact that someone is offended proves only that someone is offended - it does not prove that the offense is justified. And even if the offense is justified, that doesn't prove the offended party is right. Some people deserve to be offended. Maybe the offense means the person's value system is a mess and needs to be reorganized....

The fact that an idea is racist, sexist, reactionary, liberal, conservative, secular humanist, atheist or fascist - even if the label is accurate - doesn't make it false. Or true, for that matter. The idea that blacks are intellectually inferior to whites is wrong because it's unsupported by data, not because it's racist. When the label loses its force, argument by label loses its force, but data endures....

Which is why we do not go into any subject—even ones with potential racist or sexist overtones—excluding particular questions just because we're afraid we might get "the wrong answers"! To paraphrase Shakespeare, The data will out.

Some activists will point out that criminals were victims of abuse, inequality, injustice and so on. Often true, always regrettable when it is. But the real issue is this: did the particular victim of the crime ever harm the criminal? If the answer is no, if that particular individual had never harmed his attacker, then the attacker had an obligation to reciprocate in kind. Period. Wholly apart from whatever other pain or injustice the attacker had ever suffered, that individual had never wronged him, and he therefore owed that person the same dignity.

Allow me to second all of those ideas, enthusiastically.

[Jack] Schwarz showed up at Menninger in the fall of 1971. Once he got into the [Elmer and Alyce] Greens' lab, he produced two six-inch steel sailmaker's needles, which he promptly pushed through his biceps. When he pulled them out, he bled freely for ten seconds. Then the bleeding stopped and the hole closed completely. When he did it a second time, he did not bleed at all. (Tony Schwartz, What Really Matters)

Impressive. But not moreso than Dr. Bernard, one of the early ministers in Yogananda's Self-Realization Fellowship church:

One of his demonstrations was to push a hat pin in one side of his throat and out the other, then remove the object, showing the flesh bloodless and without a mark. (Norman Paulsen, Christ Consciousness)

Impressive, again. Yet, from Milbourne Christopher's Mediums, Mystics & the Occult (p. 151):

[Paul Diebel] forced long needles, nails, and slender knives through the fleshy part of his body without drawing blood. After he jammed a dagger through his left forearm, he would walk through the audience to give the spectators a close-up look at the blade extending four or five inches from his skin. Then he would approach the footlights and under a powerful spotlight make drops of blood ooze from his chest to form a cross....

A spectator, standing several feet away form Diebel on the stage, would take aim with a powerful slingshot and send a large metal bolt flying toward his chest. Stepping back slightly as the missile struck, the European fakir would then pause, pry the bolt from his midsection, turn from right to left so that everyone could see the wound, then bow.

Diebel's stunts were not illusions. He really did force needles and thin blades through his flesh. If the portion of the skin to be penetrated is pinched between the fingers only a slight stinging sensation will be felt. This pressure anesthesia has been used by physicians. The cross formed as blood emerged through the tiny slits Diebel had cut in his skin earlier. His mental and muscular control were such that he could withstand the pain and take the impact of the catapulted bolt without flinching.

All of which pales in comparison to the pin-cushion feats of one Mirin Dajo (p. 152-3):

Bare to the waist, the thin, balding, bearded Dajo stood erect as [his friend and assistant] De Groot carefully positioned the point of an [unsterilized] épée in his friend's back and applied pressure. The mystic's face reddened; he became tense, then seemed to enter a trance. De Groot carefully, steadily, forced the weapon through the body. The tip broke skin on the far side and extended more than twelve inches. There was no blood....

X-rays revealed no interior damage, disclosed no infected areas, though blades had penetrated his torso more than five hundred times.

Fascinated by the mystery for which there seemed to be no rational solution, [Professor Albert Bessemans of the University of Gent in Belgium] ordered smaller blades of precisely the same shape as those employed by Dago. Then in his laboratory Bessemans inserted them as carefully as De Groot had done in mice, guinea pigs, rabbits, and eventually, a dog. The animals lived despite these impalements, even though they did not—presumably—have any special psychic powers....

[Dajo] had announced he would dematerialize a thin pointed metal rod, thirty-five centimeters (almost fourteen inches) long, in his gullet. After he placed the rod in his throat [he] became violently ill. An operation at a Zurich hospital on May thirteenth disclosed that the lower end of the rod had penetrated the inner wall of his stomach; he died seventeen days later....

And then, we have the adventures of Narasingha Swami (p. 154):

A mystic from Andhra, Madras, who believed he had mastered hatha yoga, a system of mind and body control, to the point where a lethal diet would not affect him adversely, demonstrated his immunity before an audience of government officials, physicists, and physicians at the Presidency College in Calcutta. Narasingha Swami, a dark-skinned ascetic with long brown hair and a beard, swallowed poisons and ate broken glass and handfuls of nails. Then he traveled to Burma to repeat the same feats in Rangoon. An Associated Press dispatch [from 1932] said he had gulped down nearly a quart of corrosive liquids followed by the usual fragments of glass. "Two hours later he said he felt ill. In another hour he was dead."

You know what they say: Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful astral body.

I was recently informed of the existence of this interesting blog exposing Sexy Sadie:

The TM-Free Blog. From which:

There were rumours on that ATR [i.e., Advanced Teaching and Rounding course] in [19]75 that Mahesh was going to teach Kriya Yoga. I had heard about Kriya Yoga and Yogananda because like so many, I had read Autobiography of a Yogi. But Mahesh had repeatedly made fun of Yogananda on my Teacher Training Course (TTC), "Yogananda brought the bicycle age, TM is the jet age." Always, this was followed by gales of laughter coming from the little garden gnome [i.e., the Maharishi] sitting on the silk draped and flower cloaked couch at the front.

More laughter from the gnome: "Yogananda taught so many things, it takes all day to do them." At the time, I never questioned how he knew this....

I began to study Yogananda's SRF lessons. One came every week. Compared to TM and the gnome's endless self-flattering talk, Yogananda was shallow....

Taken just in terms of the Lessons, that may be true. If that were all there was to it, though, yours truly wouldn't have believed all the fairy tales for over a decade.

But, I persisted and finally received the Kriya instructions. The basic Kriya is to move the energy from the point between the eyebrows up to the crown of the head then down the spine stopping at each of the charkas [sic]. When one reached the last charka [sic] at the base of the spine, one moved up one by one to the charka [sic] between the eyes. Rather than using mantras, one breathed from one chakra to the next, all minutely explained in lesson after lesson. This was one Kriya. Beginners started out doing a Maximum of 28 [sic] Kriyas with the eventual hope of being able to do 108 Kriyas.

Lessons were sent, fine points explained, and questions were asked. Time and time again, I wrote the exams and received personal attention from one of the Monks at "mother centre." When I responded successfully, then the next level of kriya instruction was received. If you have had any involvement with the TM Organization, can you say organized and caring?

Trying. Very. Hard. Not. To. Scream.

But discovering that my A of E [?] from Mahesh and his Holy Tradition and Purity of the Teaching was, in fact, a reworking of Yogananda's Kriya Yoga was not only funny but set me on a path of investigation of all things TM and Mahesh.

And, on a more leftist note, next up for auction is an interminable exposé of various perennial philosophers (which utterly misses the cross-cultural astronomical and neurological origins of religion, but anyway), centered on Rene Guenon, with but a few juicy nuggets:

The Spiritual Fascism of Rene Guenon and His Followers. From which:

I met Huston Smith in California who got me into the Schuon cult that Smith was also a member of, though I later watched as he lied about this and covered it up. I lost my respect for him....

Schuon surpassed Blavatsky's and Guenon's outrageous claims by asserting he had been visited and has sexual-spiritual relations with the nude Virgin Mary....

[Schuon] told me to my face that he is the "pole of the world" the "manifestation of the logos at the end of time." This was an idea he deduced from Guenon, who thought much the same thing of himself....

Himmler was devoted to the Hindu text, the Bhagavad Gita, and "he never went anywhere without it"....

In Plato's Republic he [Plato] recommends, like the Hindus, selective breeding [cf. caste system], eugenics, social control and a doctrine of mind control that would oversee the intimate behavior and thoughts of all citizens in his "utopia."

Well, doesn't that just take the archetypal biscuit?

And then there's this eyesore of a site, with the text from a few of Ananda Coomaraswamy's books (halfway down the page).

In that very earliest depiction, we already find the Catholic idea that the older myths are prefigurements of the new. (Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That)

Me, I've taken to celebrating Saturnalia instead.

Drinking heavily, but trying not to make an ass (or ox) of myself....

'Cause, you know, What Would Baby Jesus Do?

Hey, the entire text of Da Free John's book Garbage and the Goddess is online!

It really isn't much of a book, but this saves me from having to find a used copy on abebooks.com. 'Cause, you know, I ditched my old (used) copy a couple of years ago, when I "knew I'd never need it again."

I've been re-reading Huston Smith's (close friend of kw) regressive, anti-progress (1992 [1976]) book, Forgotten Truth. From which:

[I]t is gratifying that my critique of Darwinism (as distinct from evolution) in Chapter Six has gained support since it was written. Those who wish to update themselves on the subject are directed to Phillip E. Johnson's Darwin on Trial....

Heh. From Wikipedia:

The most serious specific allegation leveled by a number of critics is that Johnson, like most proponents of intelligent design, is often intellectually dishonest in his arguments advancing intelligent design and attacking the scientific community. For example, he has been accused of numerous equivocations, particularly involving the term naturalism which can refer either to methodological naturalism or to philosophical naturalism.

In fact-checking Johnson's books Darwin on Trial and Defeating Darwinism, one reviewer has argued that almost every scientific source Johnson cited had been misused or distorted, from simple misinterpretations and innuendos to outright fabrications. The reviewer, Brian Spitzer, a professor of Biology, described Darwin on Trial as the most deceptive book he had ever read.

And you wonder where Wilber gets his mixed-up, anti-Darwinist ideas from....

Julia Sweeney had it right:

[A]lthough [Huston Smith] knows so much about religion he knows nothing about what science is or how it works.

From Paramahansa Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi:

Once Bhaduri Mahasaya performed the Bhastrika ["Bellows"] Pranayama before me with such amazing force that it seemed an actual storm had arisen in the room! Then he extinguished the thundering breath and remained motionless in a high state of superconsciousness.

From Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman's Why We Believe What We Believe:

Vigorous breathing ... when continued for many minutes, can even trigger hallucinogenic experiences....

You don't say....

The MIT OpenCourseWare website. 1800 courses for free!

And at Yale, too!

Well, there's science, and then there's science:

To see if yelling resulted from how vigorous the sex was, the scientists counted the number of pelvic thrusts males gave and timed when they happened. They found when shouting occurred, thrusting increased. In other words, hollering led to more vigorous sex.

Counting monkey pelvic thrusts is admittedly "quite weird, but it's science," researcher Dana Pfefferle, a behavioral scientist and primatologist at the German Primate Center, told LiveScience. "You get used to it."

The Four Horsemen. Of atheism, that is.

And, some other interesting comments on Harris's more woo-woo side, as given in Spirited Away. From which:

Harris declares "the end of faith" only to celebrate the beginning of a new age of spirituality. That such a prominent rationalist is prepared to reclaim spiritualism in the name of science matters. When spiritualism, or mysticism, claims the status of rational knowledge or science, it ends up transforming what is essentially an ecstatic emotional experience into a knowledge claim about the nature of reality....

He celebrates the growing popularity of western and eastern occult traditions, everything from "shamanism, Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Hermetism and its magical Renaissance spawn (Hermeticism) and all the other Byzantine paths whereby man has sought the Other in every guise of its conception." He rejects a naturalistic understanding of nature and the human mind and sets consciousness free from such mortal things as brains and bodies, allowing the possibility of pan-psychism, the doctrine of immanence of awareness or consciousness throughout the universe....

Harris believes that spiritual experiences are knowledge experiences which can "uncover genuine facts about the world." He buys into the basic idea that what mystics "see" in their minds actually has an ontological referent in the world outside their minds. Or to put it in the vocabulary he prefers, when the gap between the subject and object vanishes, "pure" awareness of one's subjectivity can tell us something about the objective reality....

The mystical beliefs which Harris so approves of are every bit as unscientific, untestable and unverifiable as the religious belief he so aggressively attacks.

With or without that, though, Harris's guesting on Integral Naked is not excusable. Even if he was there just to promote (the sale of) his book, anyone who happens by that site is going to take his presence there as an implicit endorsement of Wilber's work. Is that really what he wants? Is he okay with that? If not, is selling a few extra copies of a book worth that "integral whoring" on his part?

Integral Naked, need it be said, is strictly a bully pulpit; it makes no pretenses of being a "news channel," even a la CNN. No one whose ideas conflicted significantly with kw's "integral" notions has been invited to speak there, not even just to be torn down, as some of Bill O'Reilly's guests on FOX have.

No one would take an author's appearance on FOX or CNN as indicating an endorsement by him or her of the wonky political views of those stations. But the same is absolutely not true of one's guesting on IN, and the implicit/perceived endorsement of its corresponding "spiritual views."

I went out last night to take in an open stage hosted by a very good guitarist, Noah Zacharin. Not to play there, just to have a couple of beers and a veggie burger, for a too-rare night out.

Got there shortly after 8 pm, to find that the gig was being hosted by Jeff Stone instead. Really nice guy, salt of the Earth, currently doing his Master's in Theology ... as I found out later in the evening.

Zacharin walked in with his guitar around two-thirds of the way through the evening. Turns out he had just flown back from Israel on an eight-hour flight, having gotten up twenty-four hours earlier.

Obviously, no one is at his best at the end of that kind of day. The smart thing to do is to just go home, have a couple of drinks, and crawl into bed.

Zacharin didn't do the smart thing. Instead, around three-quarters of the way through the evening, he took over the hosting duties.

The structure of the open stage at that particular folk club is that the host gets three or four sets of two songs each, interspersed throughout the evening, while everyone else gets only one set of two songs (or ten minutes, whichever comes first).

So, Zacharin gets up on stage for his first two-song set, and a table of four or five people in the corner are talking amongst themselves while he plays. Or at least, judging from his reaction, they must have been talking—I was just two tables away, and hadn't heard anything from their direction; but he, as the reincarnation of Glenn Gould, must have.

'Cause, without interrupting his playing, he turns over to them and says: "You're really bothering me."

Needless to say, that shut them up pretty good.

So, later on, getting close to midnight, with only around half a dozen people left in the room, Stone sits down next to me, and starts jokingly messing around with the $40 I had put in the tip tray—waiting (and waiting some more) for the waitress to give me my change, so I could head home.

The previous artist finishes his mini-set, they go through all the commotion of unplugging the acoustic guitar pickup and the standard "Let's have a round of applause for [your name here]," etc., and then Zacharin plugs his guitar in, takes the stage, and starts talking. Not playing a song, mind you, just talking.

Not that I really noticed any of that except peripherally, as I was much more interested in finding out from Stone what exactly he was doing his Master's in, which (by virtue of it being "the farthest thing from an MBA") segued into how George Bush has an MBA, and yet has been responsible for some of the worst economic (not merely military) decisions the U.S. government has ever made.

And just as that conversation is finishing up, Zacharin dictates: "Keep it down in the first row." Which, you know, was where I was sitting. Not "Would you guys mind keeping it down a little, I'm trying to do a song up here," or anything polite like that. No, just "Keep in down in the first row." As if it was up to him to overtly control the behavior of his audience.

Ironically, the guy I had been talking with—who was "half to blame" for the (completely moderate) level of our conversation—was again the same guy who had been covering for Zacharin in hosting for the first three-quarters of the show. Talk about gratitude, eh?

If he had been playing a song, rather than just yapping onstage, I wouldn't have dreamed of talking through it: I never do that. But all he was doing was yapping. Maybe it was about the story behind his next song (the previous two [or four?], for all of their fretboard intricacy, had been utterly unmemorable—like Stuart Davis, he doesn't know how to write "hooks"), maybe it was about his recent tour through England and Israel ... who knows? Who cares? It's an unwritten rule of open stages that, if there's no music playing, the audience can talk amongst themselves! I've never seen anyone take issue with that before. (Hell, when I did a half-hour, "Best of the Open Stage" set in the same place back in the middle of August, the room was full of people who were there just to see their Spanish-singing friend/relative, all of whom talked so friggin' loud even during my songs that I could hardly hear myself play. You just have to write it off as a learning experience, and hope for better the next time. Yet this great "artist" last night couldn't handle others talking even when he was just yapping, not even playing? Double hell: When Gordon Lightfoot was playing coffee houses in Yorkville [downtown Toronto] in the '60s, and doing originals when everyone else was doing covers, you don't think 90% of the room was talking throughout his performance? Of course they were. Idea for a song: "The Folksinger and the Pea.")

So, after receiving that "order" from Zacharin, I just got up, paid my bill, and walked out. As far as I can recall, from that annoyed state of mind, he still hadn't started playing by the time I exited the building, around two minutes later.

So, way to go, Zach. You just completely lost the respect (and support) of someone who cared enough about your art to want to get there early, to hear every note. (Back in late '99 or early 2000, I actually took in a show of his that was being recorded for a live album.) Brilliant of you. Maybe next time you're childishly bothered by the completely reasonable behaviors of your audience/bystanders, you might want to just flip them off or spit at them, a la Avril Lavigne. From a punk perspective, that could actually be taken as a compliment, right?

It didn't help that my own up-at-the-ungodly-hour-of-seven day included a Cynthia Larson-like "reality shift," of "things appearing out of nowhere," in my search for a wall calendar.

That search led me to a bookstore on Bloor Street. There, I walked in, looked around in the corner by the maps and magazines, walked a little further into the bookshelf-lined corridor, then turned around and asked the college-age male clerk (think Mark Ruffalo in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, with the same glasses) at the front of the store: "Do you guys sell any calendars?"

Him (politely): "Yeah, they're right there behind you, at eye level."

I turned around, and sure enough, there were a few wall calendars hanging on a wire, right in the corridor where I had previously looked around, thoroughly enough, and found none. (In my own feeble defense, I was expecting them to be in the shelves along the walls, not hanging in the middle of nowhere.)

I say a sincere "Thanks!" and walk toward those hanging treasures.

And as I walk slowly along the fifty-foot corridor, it becomes clear that there are two lines of calendars, stretching all the way to the back of the room—at least four dozen different designs, one right after the other.

No one could have missed seeing all that. The only possible explanation is that the calendars all materialized out of thin air, violating the laws of physics but simultaneously assuring me that miracles do happen!

And as the sheer magnitude of that display dawns on me, the "Mark Ruffalo" dude behind me says, to no one in particular: "Aye chihuahua." Which I'm pretty sure is teen-speak for, "Christ, is this guy completely fucking blind?" He then goes back to talking with the other (female) clerk at the front of the store, about the brilliant comic-book work of some guy I've never heard of.

So, as you can see (no pun intended), in between being up at seven, being (understandably) dissed by some kid half my age (hock a loogie on 'em for me, Avril!), and then being shat upon by a tetchy guy noticeably older than me for having done nothing wrong at all, I had a pretty rough day. <Sigh>

Every time Ken Wilber opens his mouth about evolution, it takes me a few days to get all my information together—quacks can always create woefully wrong ideas much faster than debunkers can counter them. So, I've added this to the debate.

And, on a separate subject, an interesting page on Ayurveda and a certain holistic doctor, here.

From Cynthia Larson's book, Aura Advantage:

Guy Coggins, founder and owner of Aura Imaging Systems and inventor of the Aura camera and the WinAura video system, first became interested in aura photography in 1970 when he saw a Kirlian camera at a holistic health event. Coggins was fascinated by the Kirlean photography and dreamed of one day building a camera that could photograph the aura around a person's body. The Aura camera, which Coggins subsequently invented and refined over the past thirty years, transmits radio waves through a person's energy field, which are detected by electrical sensors on an antenna grid receiver system behind the person and translated by a computer into colored lights that appear around the person's head and shoulders in the Polaroid photograph. This Aura camera and his newer computer/video WinAura system have made practical aura viewing a reality, helping people get instant feedback about their auras.

However, from Joe Nickell's Aura Photography: A Candid Shot:

Can a photograph lie? I was intrigued by the process, which I found demonstrated at a psychic fair at Olcott Beach in western New York (July 17, 1999). There I posed for my very own "Full Body Aura Photograph"....

The photograph ... showed such an intense "energy field" of yellow-bordered white light that it washed out my facial features. The printout designated this area as "Yellow" and interpreted it (in grammatically unparallel fashion) as "Sunny, Exhilaration." (Small areas of "Green"—"Healing, Teaching"—were shown on either side.) One of the enterprise's "experienced Certified Aura Imaging Counselors" told me the bright area of light showed I had prominent "spiritual" qualities....

When I returned to the booth for a second portrait, the proprietor seemed discomfited, asking me why I wanted another. I expressed curiosity, wondering aloud whether different moods would affect the outcome. She said it would, jokingly cautioning me not to think about sex and—when I asked what would happen—telling me the color red would predominate.

In fact, however, while I (blush) thought vividly about the warned-against subject ... my aura was depicted in the resulting photo ... as predominately blue ("Peaceful, Contemplative") and green ("Healing, Teaching").

As a knowledgeable source explained to Nickell:

The computer plots the information from the sensors. Within the camera is a liquid crystal display [LCD] of different colors. Each electrical frequency plotted by the computer is assigned a different color. The higher frequencies are assigned warmer colors—reds, yellows, oranges. The lower frequencies fall toward the cooler end of the spectrum—blues and purples. Greens and shades like turquoise, aquamarine, and yellow-green fall into the center of the vibrational spectrum. Coggins said he worked with psychics who helped him interpret the frequencies, and the colors they could represent. People with a lot of high energy in their field—red and orange—are described by most clairvoyants as vibrant and passionate.

Hmm. Maybe the LinuxAura or Apple iAura would do better....

From Cynthia Larson's (2004) book, Aura Advantage:

Medical studies have recently been published in reputable, refereed journal describing how non-local healing occurs when people pray for advanced AIDS case patients [the footnote here directs one to Fred Sicher and Elisabeth Targ's 1998 study, published in the Western Journal of Medicine] and coronary care unit patients. Patients who were prayed for had fewer medical problems than those who were not, even though the patients and their doctors did not know which patients were being prayed for. These experiments were rigorous, repeatable, and reliable; and their impact on Western medicine and thinking has been and will continue to be profound.

However, from the Skeptical Briefs newsletter:

Citing for his information the project's biostatistician and co-author Dan Moore, physicist Mark Comings (Targ's husband, whom she married just two months before her death), and commentary from senior author Fred Sicher, [Po] Bronson reports [in an article for Wired in 2002] that "her study had been unblinded and then 'reblinded' to scour for data that confirmed the thesis—and the Western Journal of Medicine did not know this fact...." The data were fudged—seriously fudged—and this is, as we will see, a kind word for what she and her team did. The original aim was to measure mortality, which failed badly because of the anti-AIDS drugs that had become available. So the data were unblinded and sifted several times to look for positive results. Bronson reports that Targ (encouraged by her father, alleged psychic Russell Targ), and Sicher, a strong believer in distant healing, ordered Moore to search and re-search the data to find results that seemed statistically significant. The account of how this was done reveals shameful violations of scientific procedure.... Desperate to produce positive results, the team finally decided to measure a new set of data, the incidence of twenty-three AIDS-related illnesses which had not even been part of their study. And "when Targ and Sicher wrote the paper that made her famous, they let the reader assume that all along their study had been designed to measure the twenty-three AIDS-related illnesses—even though they're careful never to say so. They never mentioned that this was the last in a long list of endpoints they looked at, or that it was data collected after an unblinding".... This is a serious charge which, if true, represents incredible violations of the principles of scientific research.

And you wonder why I don't believe a word of any parapsychological claim anymore? It always ends up being something like this.

Larson herself has a bachelor's degree in physics from U.C. Berkeley. She has participated in research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, and has also provided camera design advice for Aura Imaging Systems. From the Biography page on her www.realityshifters.com website:

The fact that our thoughts and feelings change the physical world was made clear to Cynthia one day when she was young and feeling particularly relaxed and energized; she looked out a window at the rain falling outside, and noticed the rain stopped when she thought "stop," and started again when she thought "start."

After getting married and having two children, Cynthia's high sense perception dramatically improved, and she noticed many shifts in reality—definite changes to objects in the physical world. She saw people, cars, a statue and many other things appear, disappear, transport and transform, as well as changes in the passage of time.

The shopping page on the same website duly advertises that "Everything you purchase here is blessed with healing energy." As she herself demonstrates above, her work is outright delusional—not to mention that she actually considers socks getting lost in the dryer to be the product of a "reality shift"!

Not surprisingly, Larson's work has given high praise by Ken Wilber's "alternative-to-medicine" friend Larry Dossey, who said, and I quote:

If you think science has explained away the magic of existence, you need seriously to read this book.

Of course Dossey, as usual, has got it completely wrong: It isn't that science has explained away the magic of existence, it's that science has explained away the existence of magic, of exactly the type as is being purveyed by both Larson and Dossey himself. Huge difference.

I just saw that the top three (dollar-wise, presumably) concert tours currently going on are for Genesis, Bruce Springsteen, and Van Halen.

Good Lord—it's like one of those dreams where I'm back in high school....

And as we speak, with Mana in the #5 spot, Japan is re-discovering the glam-rock and fashion sense of David Bowie....

Self-organizing systems operating according to mathematical laws, as implemented in simple (StarLogo) computer programs?

Check it out.

[The] programs supplement a book entitled Self-Organization in Biological Systems which has been published by Princeton University Press. The simulations model biological systems in which complex group behavior emerges from simple instructions carried out by autonomous units without any centralized control [i.e., systems which are "organized without an organizer," which is one form of self-organization].

From Chapter 7 of that book:

[B]iological systems display far more complexity than can be accounted for by direct genetic coding. One of the revelations of self-organization studies is that the richness of structures observed in nature does not require a comparable richness in the genome but can arise from the repeated application of simple rules by large numbers of subunits. There is no contradiction or competition between self-organization and natural selection. Instead, it is a cooperative "marriage" in which self-organization allows tremendous economy in the amount of information that natural selection needs to encode in the genome. In this way, the study of self-organization in biological systems promotes orthodox evolutionary explanation, not heresy.

(The above scientifically defensible quote regarding self-organization differs from Ken Wilber's position in that kw won't allow any amount of time, genetic coding, or Kauffman-esque self-organization—nor any amount of scientific explanation—to be sufficient for "dirt to get up and start writing bad novels.")

Wilber has, by now, reduced his blessed, pre-rational Eros to potentially being "[not] a metaphysical force, just an intrinsic force of self-organization," yet still apparently in addition to the self-organization modeled by Kauffman, et al., on the pretense that more self-organization is needed in his Kosmos than materialistic science can provide. Even if one chooses to humor him on that highly dubious point, however, you still can't create an ontological reality for migrainous or hallucinatory experiences out of it. And those "higher states/stages of consciousness" are surely what kw really wants to have as examples of "creative emergence," in the fabricated "Wilber-archy" of the "Kosmos." (The emphasis on poetry is, I think, just a convenient "leader" into the transpersonal realms; what he's really trying to pull over is that "dirt can't get up and consciously experience the astral or causal realms, or rest in the Witness" without Eros to animate it. That is, even if dirt could get up and write poetry, by whatever algorithmically expressible laws, it could never evolve into astral, causal and transcendent stages or levels of consciousness. So, Wilber's fixation on poetry here is just the "thin edge of the wedge" which he wants to use to sneak Eros into the Kosmos; 'cause if he can get you to [wrongly] grant him that poetry is an "emergent" phenomenon, he'll parlay that all the way up the Great Chain of Being.)

So, Kenny may manage to weasel out of one minor criticism of his half-baked, horrendously unscientific ideas. But just as a wing takes "100 mutations" to create, there are "999 other" decimations of his often-dishonest notions that he won't respond to, simply because he can't refute them, even with his patented weasel-words.

I, for one, have never considered Wilber's misrepresentations of high-school-level evolutionary theory to be anywhere near the "most wrong" aspects of his life's work. (Notwithstanding that his past endorsement of Michael Behe's work should continue to cast serious doubt on how well kw has ever understood evolution. He's also stated recently that "natural selection saves previous selections, and this reduces dramatically the probability that higher, adequate forms will emerge," but presumably he just wasn't paying attention when he wrote that; 'cause otherwise it's proof positive that he really doesn't understand Evolution 101.) Even something as "trivial" as Wilber's dangerously stupid endorsements and defenses of Da Free John is worse than his "half-truths and lies" about evolutionary theory, from any practical perspective. And his grossly incompetent and/or brutally dishonest misrepresentations of Skip Alexander's equally ineptly performed experiments in meditation research alone would tell you all you need to know about the man's work and character. There's no way he can weasel out of those misrepresentations, pretending a decade after the fact that they were just intended, from the beginning, to be taken as "metaphors for creative emergence," rather than deceptions designed to get you to cave to his wonky view of reality (with him at the non-dual top)! Rather, all he can do is ignore them, safe as "Kwasimodo" in his "Integral Sanctuary," in the hope that they'll go away.

They won't go away.

Ken, try to understand this much, you integral dumbfuck: When critics respond to what you wrote, rather than what you now claim (a decade after the fact!) to have meant by the words you used, the problem is not with them for being "flatland thinkers." No, the problem is with you, for either not expressing yourself clearly enough in the first place ... or for (then, and/or now) lying through your rotten, integral teeth in the attempt to fool others into deferring to your laughable "expertise." Some "Einstein" you turned out to be, eh?

If David Lane is a "flatland thinker" now (i.e., since 1996), for questioning your understanding of evolution, why did he blurb enthusiastically for your A Sociable God in 1983? If Frank Visser is now a resident of flatland, why did you invite him to be a founding member of the Integral Institute, around a decade age? Hmm, Ken? Why? Are you really so deranged that you think these people are going backwards through your Fore Kwadrants? Or had you simply not noticed that, as people evolve in their view and knowledge of the world, they outgrow your unsupportable, fabricated ideas?

Wilber's slipperiness (a decade too late; how long does it take to think up a butt-covering lie?) into the "it was just a metaphor" idea bears an odd but significant resemblance to the introduction of the English Bible half a millennia ago, and the rise of Christian fundamentalism from that:

[B]eing able to read the sometimes frightening set of moral codes spelled out in the Bible scared many literate Englishmen into following it to the letter, said James Simpson, a professor of English at Harvard University....

Persecution and paranoia became the norm, Simpson said, as the new Protestants feared damnation if they didn't interpret the book properly.

It has taken a good 500 years since then for the world at large to even start untangling itself from that set of fairy tales, naïvely taken as if they were literally true. (We live, after all, in a world in which books about atheism are still radical, and where an atheist politician has no hope of getting elected.) And most of that untangling has come about only due to the pressures of scientific discoveries as to the real nature of the world, and our existence in it. Without "reductionistic physical science" to tell us that it makes no sense to take the Word of God literally, we'd still be thinking that the Earth was just six thousand years old.

So, how much of the Only Begotten Pandit's writings (i.e., The Word of Ken), well outside of his gross misrepresentations of basic evolution, do you think might turn out to be "just metaphors," which only a "flatland thinker" would be so foolish and unevolved as to take literally? How much of his four-faced "integral story" fails to square with the discoveries of science, and thus cannot be taken as being literally true (cf. the myth of Skip Alexander's "two-stage" meditation research)?

Maybe all of it?

Good luck sorting that all out, fundamentalist Wilber-ites. If you get it wrong—or, more accurately, if you get it right, and end up "excommunicated" from the Church of Wilberland—see you in First-Tier Hell!

Bwuaa-haa-haa!

P.S. Do you really think Wilber would have recommended that readers consult Michael Behe's long-discredited work for examples of things which Darwinian evolution supposedly can't explain, if his own "half wing" claims were just intended as metaphors from the beginning? Or are Behe's bad-science examples, too, just "metaphors"? I don't think so. Wilber was dead serious in claming that Behe's examples show that Darwinian evolution "can't explain shit." He can't hide behind the "metaphor" claim for that. And in his recent laughing (with Astin) over "why would a half wing make running easier" (when research from half a decade ago has shown that it does confer that benefit), he shows once again that, contrary to his own proud claims, he in no way keeps up with the field "religiously." For if he did, he would already have known that flapping their wings does help birds run (and survive) better.

In looking back over my past blog postings, I noticed that the whole thing about wings helping birds run is something I had written about back in May of 2006. Not to mention calling-out kw's predictably slippery, sliding, anti-scientific stance on the supposed need for Eros, in July of that same year.

Wilber has recently touted the immune system as something which cannot be accounted for on the basis of neo-Darwinian evolution:

[T]he complex forms of evolution that we see—such as the immune system—are not the products of mere chance mutation and natural selection....

And yet, from Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion:

Another of Behe's favourite alleged examples of "irreducible complexity" is the immune system. Let Judge Jones himself take up the story:

In fact, on cross-examination, Professor Behe was questioned concerning his 1996 claim that science would never find an evolutionary explanation for the immune system. He was presented with fifty-eight peer-reviewed publications, nine books, and several immunology textbook chapters about the evolution of the immune system; however, he simply insisted that this was still not sufficient evidence of evolution, and that it was not "good enough."

Behe, under cross-examination by Eric Rothschild, chief counsel for the plaintiffs, was forced to admit that he hadn't read most of those fifty-eight peer-reviewed papers.... After listening to Behe, Rothschild eloquently summed up what every honest person in that courtroom must have felt:

Thankfully, there are scientists who do search for answers to the question of the origin of the immune system ... It's our defense against debilitating and fatal diseases. The scientists who wrote those books and articles toil in obscurity, without book royalties or speaking engagements. Their efforts help us combat and cure serious medical conditions. By contrast, Professor Behe and the entire intelligent design movement [like Wilber with his Eros-fixation] are doing nothing to advance scientific or medical knowledge and are telling future generations of scientists, don't bother.

Going out on a limb here, but: Wilber surely hasn't read most of the relevant peer-reviewed papers either. And, in using the example of the immune system, he's still implicitly quoting Behe in favor of his position.

Or is the immune system example just another "metaphor"? No, it ain't.

Behe's Darwin's Black Box was first published (and largely refuted) in 1996, so kw couldn't reference its ideas in his ABHOE, which went to press in the same year.

There is typically at least a nine-month delay between the finishing of a manuscript and its official publication date. Only if Behe's book had been published at the beginning of the year, and kw's book near the end, could he even have had access to Behe's ideas. (Standard publishing practice for books published in November or December of a year is actually for their copyright date to be given as the next year, to avoid the "yearling effect" which makes books published late in the year appear to be "old news" as soon as the new year turns. So, if ABHOE had been written after the release of Behe's book, and then necessarily only published late in the year, it would likely carry the publication/copyright year of 1997, not 1996.)

Books are reviewed by major publications right around their official publication date—the bound galleys are back from the printer from four to five months prior to that date, simply to give that "lead" time to the major reviewers. Behe's book was reviewed in Nature in September of 1996—near the end of the year, not the beginning.

Wilber's ABHOE mentions the immune system only once ... and that one mention is given, ironically, in a strictly metaphorical context.

Thus, a very reasonable guess would be that kw has been so comfortable in recently back-pedaling about his "half-wing" claims only because he now has a "better" example, from Behe, which he hadn't even known about back in 1996, when he wrote ABHOE. So, he can dismiss his own earlier "half-truths and lies" (which is exactly what they are, don't kid yourself) as being intended only as metaphors, and can further belittle anyone who took them seriously as having supposedly missed his point!

If (I would rather say, since) kw had no better examples than his half-wing one, back in 1996, of biological evolution supposedly not being explicable in neo-Darwinian terms, I for one do not believe that he was intending that example, from the beginning, to be taken as a mere metaphor. Rather, as usual, he was either academically incompetent or knowingly lying through his teeth about that "challenge" to Darwinian evolution.

An irreducibly complex system can be built gradually by adding parts that, while initially just advantageous, become—because of later changes—essential. The logic is very simple. Some part (A) initially does some job (and not very well, perhaps). Another part (B) later gets added because it helps A. This new part isn't essential, it merely improves things. But later on, A (or something else) may change in such a way that B now becomes indispensable. This process continues as further parts get folded into the system. And at the end of the day, many parts may all be required....

It's worth noting that our scenario is neither hypothetical nor confined to the often irretrievable world of biological history. Indeed it's a common experience among computer programmers. Anyone who programs knows how easy it is to write yourself into a corner: a change one makes because it improves efficiency may become, after further changes, indispensable. Improvements might be made one line of code at a time and, at all stages, the program does its job. But, by the end, all the lines may be required. This programming analogy captures another important point: If I were to hand you the final program, it's entirely possible that you would not be able to reconstruct its history—that this line was added last and that, in a previous version, some other line sat between these two. Indeed, because the very act of revising a program has a way of wiping out clues to its history, it may be impossible to reconstruct the path taken. Similarly, we have no guarantee that we can reconstruct the history of a biochemical pathway. But even if we can't, its irreducible complexity cannot count against its gradual evolution any more than the irreducible complexity of a program does—which is to say, not at all. (H. Allen Orr, "Darwin v. Intelligent Design (Again)")

If the history of science shows us anything, it is that we get nowhere by labeling our ignorance "God" [or Eros]. Lord Kelvin declared that the primaeval Earth had cooled down too quickly to permit the great age required by Darwinism. How could he imagine that radioactivity would be discovered four decades later and prove the missing source of heat? Duane Gish, the doyen of American creationists, once argued for the separate creation of mammals and reptiles, based on their jaw structure. Each has a jaw joint made from a different pair of bones, and Gish could not imagine how the transitional form could chew while its jaw was being unhinged and rearticulated. In 1958, however, Fuzz Crompton described a mammal-like reptile with a double jaw joint that included both pairs of bones. (Jerry Coyne, "God in the Details")

As always, whenever the Bald Moron opens his mouth, he just digs himself in deeper. He is truly his own worst enemy.

Oh, and quantum-mechanical events, being inherently without cause in the orthodox (non-Bohmian) interpretation, are even "worse" than random mutations in biology, in terms of knowing what "caused" them. Is that, too, something which should be accounted for on the basis of "Eros"? Is quantum physics, too, a "philosophy of 'Oops'," to which Wilber will be contributing his ideas in the future? If not, why not?

Why stop with injecting Eros into evolution? Why not join with the Fred Alan Wolfs and Amit Goswamis of the world, and have Eros/consciousness affect the behavior of matter through the quantum realm? Conversely, if Wilber wants to distance himself from the wonky "physics and consciousness" set, on what basis does he differentiate himself, here? How is his idea of Eros slightly biasing evolution a more respectable suggestion than having consciousness affect (or bias the results of) the quantum wavefunction, in its "collapse" or otherwise?

Quite simply, it isn't any more respectable—it has exactly the same anti-scientific "quack factor."

• I Will Comply

• Take Me To The Liver

• Homer And Marge

• Won't Eat Prunes Again

• You Don't Take Your Showers

• Theme From Rocky XIII

• I'll Repair For You

• If I Could Make Love To A Bottle

• It's Still Billy Joel To Me

• Flatbush Avenue

• Gravy On You

• Girls Just Want To Have Lunch

• Born To Be Mild

• Avocado

• Hit Me With A Rock

• Whole Lotta Lunch

This, from some anonymous half-wit of a coward, found its way into my Yahoo! email inbox today—the account I only expose online for "dolts, bots, and idiots." From tac@mailinator.com (or godofredo@dasmuchapena.uk?), ver batim:

"Krishnamurti carried on an affair for over twenty years with the wife of a good friend. Chögyam Trungpa drank himself into an early grave. One of Adi Da's nine "wives" is a former Playboy centerfold. Bhagwan Rajneesh sniffed laughing gas to get high. Andrew Cohen, guru and publisher of What Is Enlightenment? magazine, by his own reported admission sometimes feels "like a god."

Ha, ha, ha whaaaaaaa, haa, ha....
Is this science? or a scientific theory about how the people that's worth reading should behave in their sexual lives?

Uh, no, it obviously isn't, if for no other reason than that only two of the five guru-figures mentioned were being exposed for their sex lives, in that quote. So, at most 40% of it could have been a "scientific theory about how the people that's worth reading should behave in their sexual lives." D'uh. But, y'know, if coming down against the idea of some abusive fraud like Krishnamurti fuckin' his friend's wife regularly over a two-decade period makes me a "sexual theorist," so be it. Maybe you'd have preferred it, and been completely okay with all that, if he was fucking your wife?

Why don't you criticize Wittgenstein's, Hegel's, Kant's or Einstein's writings in the same light? It's easy, very easy!
you'll be as successful and prolific as criticizing the gurus. Not that you are not right in many things, but is just an idea so you can be even more famous, earn more money or fulfill more your ego by making people stumble with little stones in their process of understanding our world or awakaning [sic] their consciousness.

Why don't you scientifically smash the artwork of Picasso, Van Gogh and Modigliani too by talking about their sexual life and other stupid considerations? You could do the same (the integral analysis of noteworthy people's lives) with writers of all countries and sexual natures, politicians, musicians, etc. So that you don't redundantly repeat so much yourself.

Hey, if the abuses of our world's guru-figures sound like a broken record, the problem is not with me for documenting all that!

Maybe you can invalidate the theory of relativity if you get to discover that Einstein did this or that with his intimate parts!

I've read around a dozen biographies of Einstein; I'm well aware of his half-dozen or so affairs, including the one with a Soviet spy, for which there are extant love-letters from him to her. Unlike Wilber and the rest of the gurus I've taken the time to research and expose, Einstein wasn't an abusive cult leader, nor did he ever try to manipulate others into deferring to any claimed "divine guidance" from himself as to how they should live their lives, based on his own (non-existent) clinical narcissism and wild, mentally unstable hallucinations. In the case of the "how-to-live" teachings of gurus, which are never (even in kw's case) confined to mere "theory," the failure to live up to their own purported standards does indeed invalidate a large amount of what they're teaching. D'uh! Just fucking think, already.

Is there any scientific interpretation to your behavior??

Well, I suppose it would ultimately be the product of random mutations and natural selection. It must have some survival value, unless it's piggy-backing on top of some other adaptive trait....

I am not a creationist, I am a mathematician and I know when what I read is not following logic.

No, dumbfuck, you clearly don't, not even close; you couldn't take kw seriously if you did possess a keen development of that faculty.

I'm aware of Wilber's mistakes, common human mistakes and some more than that.

They're frequently deliberate deceptions, not mere "mistakes." And you wouldn't even be "aware" of that much, fool, if it wasn't for the courageous, tireless and thankless work of Jeff Meyerhoff, Andrew Smith, David Lane, Frank Visser and myself, etc.

But I am also aware that he talks as clearly as almost nobody else can about very, very important things and many of his paragraphs are masterpieces.

Yeah, "windy" masterpieces of taking utterly normal, physical phenomena, and elevating them to the status of paranormality. Sure, he describes the One Taste state very well, as indeed no one else does. But what else?

I started reading many of your criticisms with interest, but I need not weeks or years to find them slanted and to deceive me [Huh? How, exactly? Anyway, slanting arguments and data to deceive you is Wilber's job, not mine!], I needed just one hour!!! [Great, open your own photofinishing store, Kodak.] You'll never be as famous as Wilber [not even when I'm a rock star?], nor bring good influence or insight" [sic] as him. 90% of the things you say are unimportant and many of your conclusions are not logical conclusions of what you try to make believe they are.

Examples? Any at all? No? Not even one? How terrifically Wilberian of you.

You should be able to see how other eyes see you, you would be ashamed.

Nope! Don't really give a flying fuck about what cowardly, braindead fools like you think of me, guy!

How can you have Wilber's books in your bibliography??? He is a man that has Lorentz [sic] books in his bibliography!!! ...

He means "Lorenz." That is, the one-time raging Nazi, Konrad Lorenz. By contrast, the Lorentz contraction, with a t in it, is (ironically) part of the equations of special relativity. It is not the same thing as "Konrad Lorenz," even if good old Kon (and his "intimate parts") may have literally shortened noticeably in the direction of his own motion at velocities approaching that of light. I'm pretty sure that kw doesn't have any of Lorentz's (physics) books in any of his bibliographies; if he does, dollars-to-Krispy-Kreme-donuts says Kensho won't have understood them.

You can't even make stuff like this up, you know. I mean, come on, guy! Meet me halfway! Your English throughout this has been beyond awkward ("the people that's worth reading"? "repeat so much yourself"? Khrist, who writes like that?) to the point where I really hope (for your sake) that it isn't your first language, 'cause you're simply not competent in it. And I was going to be nice and let that slide, but here you've just gone way over the edge!

... and Lorentz [sic, again!!] is a man that has more than 10 of his own books in his bibliography ...

The point there is presumably just that Lorenz has written more books than the three which I have, as if that could be relevant to anything. Or that Lorenz is to be viewed with awe for citing from his own books (and original research), which anyone can do. And this idiot is bitching about my use of logic, and touting his own purported ability to use the same, while spinning in lamebrain circles around that? And even while utterly missing the painfully obvious point about why it makes complete sense to criticize the personal lives and dismal character of our world's gurus, without doing the same to artists and scientists in an (invalid) attempt to discredit their artwork and theories?! Whadda maroon!!

... and also such and such and bla[h], bla[h], bla[h] writers..... (apply your [157 IQ!] brain and knowledge of the theory of evolution here [??])

Fot [sic] God's sake...Don't you know yet that you should be aware that you should avoid using microchoff [sic] and yahoolingan [sic, WTF is "lingan"?] products whenever possible!???

And you wonder why I don't make it easier for these cretins to get in touch with me? People who can't even spell "blah," yet they insist on "teaching."

The "redundantly repeat" phrase was the best; full marks for unintentional irony. Not to mention crediting me with doing an "integral analysis"! As if!! Plus, how I'm supposedly making money by sinking what little spare time I have into exposing the abuses of our world's guru figures. If only! (Seriously, I've only grossed around $500, total, from the 10,000 hours of debunking work I've done. I've spent more than fifty times as much money as I've earned, on books and website hosting—at one point, my apartment had $35,000 worth of books in it, though many of those were for planned projects that never got off the ground.) Not to mention that I'm giving STG away for free, you anonymous moron! In what system of economics do you think that would be a sustainable, money-making business model?! Maybe in some branch of Integral Mathematics, but nowhere in the real world, that's for damned sure!

As I stated explicitly in the Introduction to STG:

As to the quantity of reported "sins" covered uncomplimentarily herein, please appreciate that I myself am, in general, in no way anti-drug, anti-alcohol, anti-dildo, anti-secret-passageway-to-the-women's-dormitory, anti-whorehouse or anti-orgy, etc. It is simply obvious, by now, that any of those, when put into the hands of "god-men" who have carved islands of absolute power for themselves in the world, only make an already dangerous situation much worse.

Of course, all such protests to the contrary, it is the very nature of the gathering and publicizing of information such as this that one will be regarded as being either puritanical or shadow-projecting for doing so. Why else, after all, would anyone object to guru-disciple sex, etc., in situations where the "non-divine" party too often is a psychological child in the relationship, unable to say "No"?

The guideline that "all's fair among consenting adults so long as no one gets hurt" is reasonable enough. So then simply ask yourself as you read this book: In how many, if any, of the environments covered here has no one "gotten hurt"?

I don't know how to make it any clearer than that, as to what STG is about, and why I wrote it.

And yeah, as a best-in-cohort software developer I'm quite familiar with the childish acting-out that other programmers (and half-wit, know-nothing mathematicians too, apparently) indulge in, in dissing or boycotting Microsoft products, etc. All while claiming to be "logical" in their behaviors, as this dumbass does, too.

I've also used these machines for long enough to remember what it was like when every program had its own proprietary interface. Even if just for its role in standardizing user interfaces, the world owes the Microsoft monopoly a debt of gratitude, far more than it realizes. Not to mention that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a major donor in the search for an AIDS vaccine. What open-source group or individual can say the same? Richard Stallman, maybe? (Ha! I actually wrote the three paragraphs above, from the Introduction to STG, explicitly in response to his lecturing of me as to how there was nothing wrong with polygamy, how drunkards should be given sympathy rather than being held up to ridicule, etc. Pathetically, his lecture, too, was given after he had barely begun reading the book, but was apparently already in a position to "teach" me.)

You think Google's any better than Microsoft or Yahoo!? Do your research!

P.S. I'll catch up to Lorenz eventually ... at least in terms of quantity of writing. I've done enough research (Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, etc.) over the past few months to know that I was absolutely right about content/structural (e.g., kundalini) forms of meditation being merely internalized forms of hitherto-external (Rig Vedic, etc.) rituals. The next book I write is going to blow the claimed "spiritual" effects of meditation right out of the water. 'Cause even the stuff that's neurologically (not ontologically) real is just on the order of migrainous phenomena and the like, sometimes even to the point of already being modeled in simple neural networks. (Suggestion: Read everything Oliver Sacks has ever written. You won't regret it.)

The best part about the (cf. content-meditation) Star of the East is this:

[I]n the year of Treya's fortieth birthday, a teacher of both of us, Da Free John, began saying that the ultimate enlightened vision was when one saw the five-pointed cosmic star, in a very real and direct way....

And it is held that, at the precise moment of death, the great five-pointed cosmic star, or the clear light void, or simply great Spirit or luminous Godhead, appears to every soul....

[Treya] had simply had this vision, of the luminous cosmic star, in a very real and direct way. Thus upon actual death, I thought to myself, Treya would simply be seeing her own Original Face, and not for the first time.

Da was just borrowing that idea and symbol (uncredited) from Yogananda, and Wilber then swallowed it whole, while conveniently overlooking the fact that, as even a novice student of kriya/raja yoga would know, merely seeing that (astral! not causal or Ultimate) Star was never the goal—you're supposed to pass your consciousness through it in daily meditation, not merely at death. Regardless, the only thing real about any of that was the motions of the planet Venus, as observed by primitive astronomers/astrologers and then plotted against the ecliptic in early star charts; the rest is just internalized rituals and Imagination Run Amok.

'What Good is Half a Wing?' The Wilberian Evolution Debate Continues.

As quoted in that fine piece, contra Wilber:

[E]ven young birds with partially formed wings were aided by them when in increasing running speed. Small improvements will, as it mostly does in evolution, mean the difference between life and death. And even adults sometimes prefer running while flapping its wings to flying when trying to avoid a pursuer, as the picture shows.

The thing is, even if Eros did exist, any (guided) mutations it might produce toward some "evolutionary goal" would only be passed on to offspring if they conferred survival (and reproductive) value on their organisms more than was conferred by the other genes they were competing against. Any mutations or even outright creations, even Eros-guided ones, which didn't act to propagate themselves through the gene pool at that particular period in history, would get selected out of the population in exactly the same way as "random" mutations get selected against.

So, since the hypothesized evolutionary products of Eros are subject to exactly the same selection pressures as is everything else, the only way you could ever "need" that hypothesized underlying (pre-rational) vital force is if there wasn't enough time since the formation of the Earth for all of the mutations to occur in the production of complex life-forms. From Singh and Krimbas' Evolutionary Genetics (a volume produced in celebration of Richard Lewontin's 65th birthday):

[Concerning] the argument, which has persisted in one form or another since Darwin's time, that the amazingly intricate adaptations that we see in living organisms today could not have arisen in the lifetime of our planet through the processes of natural selection.... [Fred] Hoyle and Wickramasinghe (1981) and Denton (1986) are but the latest to promote this sorry speculation, which arises through incorrect mathematical modeling of the genetics of the evolutionary process.... In creating quite misleading mathematical models of the evolutionary process, these writers have promoted incorrect conclusions that have been detrimental not only scientifically, but also in the realm of public policy. (p. 35)

As to Kensho's simplistic, artsy freshman-like fixation on poetry as a creative act—a form of art which I, for one, know how to write, even if kw doesn't (and he doesn't, any more than he knows how to write [deliberate] fiction)—where exactly is the need for Eros in all that? Nowhere, that's where. Here's how Steven Pinker (a real scientist) put it, in his How the Mind Works (p. 67-8):

[T]o the extent that the world obeys mathematical equations that can be solved step by step, a machine can be built that simulates the world and makes predictions about it. To the extent that rational thought corresponds to the rules of logic, a machine can be built that carries out rational thought. To the extent that a language can be captured by a set of grammatical rules, a machine can be built that produces grammatical sentences. To the extend that thought consists of applying any set of well-specified rules, a machine can be built that, in some sense, thinks.

The same, obviously, applies to poetry: To exactly the same extent as it follows discernable (meter, rhyming, etc.) rules, machines can be built which enact the same rules. You don't need "Eros" for that, any more than you need Eros to "explain" gravity, or to explain how a Coke-dispensing machine works. Or, for that matter, to explain how the self-organization (via Prigogine or otherwise) of systems in chaos theory works, which likewise obeys strict mathematical laws.

So, if Stuart Kauffman (not "Kaufman," Ken) "is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection," even if he is correct, there is still no paranormal claim in that, nor any room/need for Eros.

How, then, would you be able to tell the difference (e.g., in poetry) between the products of "creative emergence," versus simple random productions which were then rigorously edited (e.g., by "poetic selection") so that only the "fittest" or best remained (e.g., from a million monkeys typing until they reproduce Shakespeare's plays)? Obviously, you couldn't.

Anyone who has ever done any artistic (or valid scientific) work knows how much you have to throw away to get a collection of songs or poems where every one is worth keeping. Leonard Cohen once wrote sixty verses for a song, publishing only one-tenth of those. That's just how it's done even if you're already working at a world-class level, never mind to initially get good at anything!

The fact that Wilber so painfully lacks that basic self-editing capability shows through far too clearly in his putrid attempts at creative writing in Boomeritis and the forthcoming "Terroritis."

Looking up some Weird Al Yankovic (a real writer) lyrics yesterday, I came across the following, from his Spy Hard song:

He's always there
when the chips are beginning to fall
He wouldn't care if they kicked him and grabbed him and
shot him and stabbed him and nailed both his ears to the wall

Wilber, by now, has had both his ears nailed to the wall regarding his imbecilic (mis)representations of high-school-level evolution. He's just too stupid and far too intellectually dishonest to ever come out and admit that. And if you hadn't ever been suckered into thinking that he was a "genius," you too would recognize him for the literal incompetent that he truly is. As I have asserted many times before, it is only because his peers in the transpersonal and integral worlds are every bit as academically incompetent, delusional, and disinterested in truth and reality, as kw himself is, that Wilber is respected in those fields. He truly wouldn't have lasted five minutes in any real field of academic endeavor.

P.S. Anyone who wanted to find room for additional levels of law underlying apparent randomness, if he was smart, would start with the following brilliant idea from David Bohm's (1987) Science, Order, and Creativity (overall, p. 126-30):

Randomness is being treated [here] not as something incommensurable with order but as a special case of a more general notion of order, in this case orders of infinite degree. This may appear to be a curious step to take, since chance and randomness are generally thought of as being equal to total disorder (the absence of any order at all). The question of the meaning of chance, randomness, and disorder has been a particular headache, not only in science, but also in mathematics and philosophy. But here it is proposed that whatever happens must take place in some order so that the notion of a "total lack of order" has no real meaning. Indeed even what are called random events do happen to take place in a definable and describable sequence and can be distinguished from other random events.

Back in late August, I was walking through Kensington Market in the evening on a Pedestrian Sunday, and came across a group of (mostly white) drummers pounding out African/Brazilian rhythms. And the one song I immediately recognized happened to be the same rhythm as was used by Paul Simon in The Obvious Child, from his Rhythm of the Saints album. (That was the follow-up to Graceland, and possibly even a better collection of songs than the 1986 Grammy-winner.)

So, either they were doing a "cover" and I was probably the only person around who realized it; or, more likely, it's a traditional Brazilian rhythm.

Well, there are two things I do know:

One, the Spirit Voices song on the same album was based on Simon's experiences with ayahuasca in the Amazon.

And two, the music and vocals just before the bridge (between "Sonny gets sunnier day by day by day by day" and "I've been wakin' up at sunrise") in The Obvious Child are lifted directly from the classic '50s doo-wop song, Get A Job.

Anyway, I've been learning to play Simon's Hearts and Bones (title track), via Mark Hanson's excellent tablature. (The tune is about the breakup of Paul's marriage to actress Carrie Fisher. It's one of Katie Melua's top-fourteen most influential songs, for good reason.)

Emma Clarke has recorded some very funny spoof london underground announcements.

After being misquoted in the Daily Mail she got sacked by the governmental morons at Transport for London. But, on the bright side, her story wound up on Yahoo! and hundreds of other news outlets, which is advertising you can't even buy.