Blog — July, 2005

Hey, look! James Randi's discovered that you can do colors in HTML!

Anyway, with that technological breakthrough in web coding, it's surely only a matter of decades, or perhaps just years, now, until they start syndicating their weekly news via RSS. Why, it seems like only yesterday (in fact, it was around a month ago) that they finally began sending out notification emails every Friday morning, for the posting of the week's new Commentary.

And what's this, from a reader in the July 29 Commentary?

Fahrenheit based his temperature scale on a previous scale (Ole Rømer's) that had fractions where water froze (7.5 degrees R). Fahrenheit, being clever, multiplied this by 4 and got 32.

One would indeed need to be clever to multiply 7.5 by 4, and get 32. "Clever like a fox."

Then, yesterday morning I found out that the "first month free" membership at Wilber's Integral Naked site, from which I recently downloaded some interviews, is less free than it should be: They charged me $10 U.S. the day after I signed up.

Granted, it was the third time I've taken out a membership there (each time on a different email address), but they've got no policy stated on their website to say that you can't do that and still get the first month free each time; so they owe me ten bucks, as I've informed them.

So they say they respond to customer service tickets within 24 hours of those being opened, but of course that's just another integral lie: they don't (it's been more than a full day already).

Worst case, I'll just contest the charge with the bank that issued the credit card which I used to pay for downloading the interviews with Billy Corgan, Neil Osbourne, and Ed Kowalczyk. (It's just research I'm doin', I'm not otherwise interested in their music or what they have to say.) So I'll get my money back regardless; it'll just be interesting to see exactly how inept the customer-service aspect of Wilber-World really is.

And then, as if all of the above weren't enough, I just got this in my inbox from Integral Naked:

Hello, hello, who's your lady friend?
Black man and babe
Huge dildo and candles
Horny latin teenager maid fuck
Teens with wet panties

No, wait ... that was porn spam, not integral delusions.

It's almost poetic, though. And lends itself quite well to haiku:

Dildo and candles
Horny teenager maid fuck
Teens with wet panties

Update (7/29/2005): Integral Naked customer service provides their reply:

Members who have subscribed a certain number of times within a period of the same number of months are not entitled to use the free 30-day trial coupon repeatedly; so I cannot offer you a refund in this case.

If there is a reasonable need for financial assistance that would enable your participation on our site, that is a special case. Please let us know if we can assist you in this particular way—just sum up any circumstances, financial liabilities and any other qualifiers that would assist your staying on Integral Naked in the future.

I assume that their nebulous statement about subscribing "a certain number of times within a period of the same number of months" means that you can't use the "free month" coupon more than once per month. (Though I don't think I did, anyway.) Regardless, that's all news to me as a user, i.e., it's not stated anywhere in the checkout/purchase process that I've ever seen, and it certainly isn't programmatically enforced in that purchase process, which at the very least it should be.

And I really don't see myself summing up my financial liabilities, etc., for Ken and Company, just to get a refund for something which I shouldn't have been charged for in the first place!

My response to them:

Where is it stated online, in the purchase process or elsewhere on the Integral Naked website, that a customer cannot use the free 30-day trial coupon repeatedly in any given time period?

If you have not clearly and explicitly stated those purported terms and conditions online, you absolutely cannot withhold a refund from any user who was not properly informed of them before signing on. That is not how the business world works, as every credit card-issuing bank knows and will be very willing to enforce should a user ever formally contest such a wrongful charge.

I demand an immediate refund for that spurious $10 charge.

Update (8/2/2005): A sensible (if grossly belated) response from Wilber Naked customer service!

It just came to my attention that the coupon use provision had not been inserted into Integral Naked's Terms of Service. I apologize for making the statement without it being established. I will assume that you would still like using the service for free and have refunded your credit card.

To quote Pink Floyd: "I certainly was in the right."

But you know, a properly designed e-commerce site wouldn't let you complete the checkout process in the first place with a coupon that you were only allowed to use once, if you had previously used it. Whether or not their policies in that regard are properly stated in the Terms of Service is a distant secondary to that.

Update (8/19/2005): Guess what I just noticed?

I have just checked my online statement, and this long-overdue refund has still not been credited to my credit card. If it has not been properly processed by your office by August 26, 2005, I will be contesting the $10.00 U.S. charge with my issuing bank.

Un-fucking-believable.

Update (8/23/2005): Could it be? Maybe?

Please accept our apologies for the delay on the refund. There was a problem with the transactions system for some time and, incidentally, it has just been fixed. I have issued the $10 refund to your card as of now, so the matter should be resolved. Again, we apologize for the delay.

Thanks for your interest in Integral Naked and take care.

Yes, care. "Taking care."

Sigh....

I worked for WOW Foods for six months back in 2001. They handled customer complaints exactly like IN does. Amazes me that they're even still in business.

You've always wondered how it was done; now, here are the step-by-step instructions for how to make your own Batphone.

Now that the SRF Walrus website has been re-opened to the public (after "extensive renovations," no doubt), this thread on Ammachi is very much worth reading, for those interested in the "Huggin' Avatar's" financial and other goings-on. As is this Amma criticism page.

Well, well, well. In Ken Wilber's "novel," Boomeritis, page 244, he has the Powell character state:

The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America's Campuses, by Kors and Silverglate, is a thorough survey of the actual state of affairs. Far from being right-wing idealogues, its authors are liberals in good standing. Instead of quoting case after case—I urge all of you to consult this book for yourselves—I will give a few of the responses from critics, simply to try to convey a sense of the urgency and outrage.

"Powell" goes on to rattle off a group of very flattering quotes from Linda Chavez, Alan Dershowitz, Christina Sommers, Nat Hentoff, and Wendy Kaminer, in support of Kors and Silverglate's book.

Turns out, though, that those supposed "responses from critics" are actually blurbs taken ver batim from the hardcover edition of The Shadow University!

As every author knows, such blurbs are generated by individuals whom one already knows to be, or at least hopes to be, sympathetic to one's ideas; they do not come from "critics"! (Dershowitz, Hentoff and Kaminer were all actually thanked for their "assistance" by the authors in the front matter of the book. "Critics"? Not bloody likely!!)

Granted, Boomeritis is purportedly a work of fiction—just as the rest of Wilber's writings are ostensibly based in fact (ha!). So, technically, he's allowed (in the former) to make up whatever "facts" he likes, and present them as if they were real.

Still, it's no surprise that someone for whom the line between fawning support and meaningful criticism is so blurred as it is for kw, could devoutly believe in the rest of the half-baked, utterly untested foolishness which constitutes transpersonal and integral psychology.

Do they have any idea who they're spamming? And sending that to an email address which I hardly use except as my Yahoo ID, for posting on Steven Hassan's Freedom of Mind group, and on the Rationalist Discussion one?

If they think that cult debunkers and rationalists are any kind of a target audience for travel to India on the theme of yoga, ayurveda and meditation....

"Movin' through Kashmir...."

From Elliot Aronson's insightful Nobody Left to Hate, regarding the root social-psychology causes of the Columbine massacre and their relation to preventing future similar tragedies:

For millions of youngsters, middle school and high school are stressful places—and much of that stress is unnecessary. There are only a small number of students who respond to that stress by lethally lashing out at their fellow students, but the number of students who are unhappy, anxious, and depressed—to the point of contemplating suicide [20%]—is much larger than most parents realize....

It is reasonably clear that a major root cause of the recent school shootings is a school atmosphere that ignores, or implicitly condones, the taunting, rejection, and verbal abuse to which a great many students are subjected.

At Columbine in 1999, and in other similar shootings (e.g., Tabor, Alberta), the assassins were not "bringing their dysfunctional home lives into school." Rather, they were reacting to the harassment and humiliation which they experienced from other students in school. That, after all, is why such young mass murderers kill their classmates and teachers, not their parents or neighbors. (In Tabor, the fourteen-year-old shooter—a gentle "friend to every woodland creature" in his childhood—had repeatedly been doused with lighter fluid and threatened with being set on fire by the bullies in his school.)

And if that is true of the perpetrators of the worst of high-school tragedies, don't you think it might also apply, at lower levels of intensity, even to the bulk of the high-school student population? Of course it will.

If you really want to know how much teachers and the school system could be doing differently, in dealing with even the worst of "problem" students, read the "Optimal Learning" article (p. 3-6) in Christopher Cowan and Natasha Todorovic's March/April 2004 Newsletter. It details the brilliantly successful attempts at teaching "unteachable, end-of-the-line" teenagers in Australia, in a twenty-week program, via competently applied Spiral Dynamics® (not Ken Wilber's misunderstanding-based bastardized version):

"Erica" first presented at an information session with a very angry, aggressive know-it-all attitude of "Oh! Here we go again ... they are going to fix me!".... Adopted at an early age, Erica had 13 years of experience in the care system. Living through physical and emotional abuse, self-harm, and depression had led to drug and alcohol addiction and a revolving door of counselors, social workers, juvenile justice supervisors and psychiatrists....

[Nell, at Optimal Learning:] I gave her the respect she needed at Red [value meme] [where behavior is often impulsive and uncontrollable]. I worked on creating the huge slabs of Purple experiences that Erica had missed out on in her earlier life and the development of the skills necessary to succeed at Purple [safety/belonging]. Erica started to feel accepted and safe and began to explore other ways to think about this world. Then we began to build references for Erica in the Blue worldview. We helped her develop skills for understanding and functioning in Blue while facilitating the shift to impulse control and consequential thinking. Erica now works full-time with young people in care and has become very well known for inspiring disconnected youth.

It is a lead-pipe cinch, I think, that previous teachers of "Erica" will have discounted all responsibility for their own difficulties with her, as deriving instead just from her "bringing her dysfunctional home-life into the school"—something which, conveniently, they would be powerless to change—being blissfully unaware of their respect-craving, authoritarian roles in bringing out that behavior. The way to get even "problem" students to respect you, after all, isn't by forcing them to call you "Sir" or "Ma'am," as one of the daft official responses to the Columbine massacre demanded. Rather, as Nell implied, above, you show genuine respect to them first; you listen to them, rather than just authoritatively/insecurely/"infallibly" "teaching" all the time.

Conversely, when even "too much independence" on the part of a best-in-class, envelope-pushing student is grounds for such authorities to sadistically conspire to deny her a diploma, thus knowingly doing all they could do to mess up the rest of her life and consign her to an adulthood of minimum-wage poverty, it is not just that teachers are doing their best to cope with problems which they didn't create! That woman was not disrupting their classes: she was simply resisting their power-tripping enforcing of arbitrary dress-code rules, without even actually breaking those rules. That is simple, Gandhi-esque passive disobedience, nothing more threatening or disruptive. And for that, an entire group of "bad apples" did their level best to fuck up her life. Beautiful. And, of course, the "good teachers" merely stood silently by, to protect their own careers, rather than doing anything to stop that unfairness.

Yes, that is all just one example—though I could easily give a second, comparable one—not a controlled study. The wishful-thinking suggestion which it's up against, though, in the belief that "if anything, the difficulties faced by high school teachers often emanate from the outside world that students bring into the schools every day," is also purely anecdotal. Realistically, basic principles of social psychology ensure that teachers who have been charged, as a condition of their continued employment, not merely with assisting their students in learning (a la Milgram's obedience experiments) but with maintaining the respect and obedience of their students (a la Zimbardo's simulated prison), will predictably degenerate into a less-intense version of good/bad prison guards when faced with any challenge to their authority. That is just how human psychology works in any hierarchical, authoritarian environment, even if the degree of integration of the school with the surrounding community is obviously much greater than of a prison with its environment.

Zimbardo himself, interestingly, has suggested comparable revisions to the prison system as have been successfully employed by the Optimal Learning people in education, in order to turn it from an environment of humiliation and punishment into a genuinely rehabilitative one.

If schools were the cooperative learning environments which they could and should be, even as Aronson describes in his own use of the "jigsaw" method to put students into positions where it is to their individual and collective advantage to cooperate and support rather than to humiliate each other, students with "bad home lives," I think, would find the school to be a refuge from those troubles, not a place for additional acting-out. That, after all, is exactly what the "Optimal Learning" environment produced in its hitherto-"impossible" students: A visible disappointment in them when a day of school was cancelled!

"You may say I'm a dreamer" ... but all of the principles necessary to create such an environment have already been thoroughly shown to work in practice, and cost next to nothing to implement.

Further as to isolation, note that even ashrams are not necessarily "completely isolated": Hidden Valley, for example, drove its programmers (including myself) into San Diego on the first Tuesday of every month, for the Visual Basic Users' Group meetings, there. The ashram also had monthly movie nights, received the daily newspaper, and had only a 35-hour work week, thus in no way "keeping people so occupied with ashram activities that they didn't have time to question the organization." Yet, given that residents there were expected to "walk across the fields upside-down on their hands" if told to do so by a supervisor, the organization, by any reasonable definition, was and still is a "cult."

Aside from a place like Jim Jones' 1970s Guyana community, few spiritual environments are completely isolated, or cut off from the outside world even to the same extent as a prison would be. And even in Jones' case, there was a group of loyal followers living in a house in the nearest town ... who actually refused to follow his order to commit suicide along with the Jonestown group.

As I explicitly stated at the end of the "Spiritual Choices" chapter in STG: "the issue in all of these cases [including high schools] is the degree of isolation from outside ideas and perspectives, specifically from being able to see how others 'like you' are behaving in the real world, to use that as a guide for your own thoughts and actions."

"Degree" is a very important word, there. Its very presence implies the existence of a continuum of isolation, with (as it happens) high schools near one end, and prisons and cults near the other end. (Any wide continuum will have end-points which are almost polar opposites of one another; if you look only at those end-points, you may well lose sight of all of the intermediate stages in the middle, connecting them. Those intermediate stages nevertheless exist.)

Moving right along, is the chapter on Thai Buddhism in STG meant as an exposé of only a few "bad apples" there, or as an indictment of the entire Buddhist community in Thailand?

Well, neither. The "Gurus and Prisoners" chapter in the same book goes into significant detail, with reference to the dynamics observed in Zimbardo's classic Stanford prison study, about how the dismal behaviors of individuals in closed, authoritarian communities are brought out by exactly those environments. As a rough estimate, Buddhism in Thailand, having comparably authoritarian social structures overseeing monastic orders as does the Roman Catholic Church, will also be comparably corrupt. (Conversely, though, the problems covered in that chapter could not possibly, not even remotely possibly, be mere "isolated incidents." Rather, they could only be the "tip of the iceberg." Basic social psychology dictates that.)

Anyone who poses the above questions about my written take on Thai Buddhism should really ask the same questions about the STG chapter on the Roman Catholic Church. There are good, non-abusive Catholic priests, too, after all; it's never the entire community that is corrupt, nor would I ever be so black-and-white in my own thinking as to suggest that it was. Every spiritual community likewise does some good, in its charity work, etc.; it's just a question of whether it's doing more good than harm (which, in my opinion, is consistently, or even universally, not the case).

For both the Catholic Church and the Thai Buddhists, it's not just a few "bad apples," and it's equally not that every apple is bad. But, far too many members of both of those communities are indeed bad, well beyond even what is documented in STG. And that's far too predictable, from elementary principles of social psychology—never mind throwing arrested sexual development into the mix—for one to be left with any "warm and fuzzy" feelings toward their respective communities.

In particular, with regard to my chapter on Ken Wilber: If kw is allowed to mimic the tone of assorted postmodern critics, in SES; to tout his own "Einsteinian" (ha!) genius in his own books; and to otherwise celebrate the life-destroying "Rude Boy" behaviors of the likes of Andrew Cohen, why should one not throw the same "beneficial nastiness" back at him? And interestingly, members of the Buddhist community who had already begun to question the direction Wilber has been taking have found that very same chapter to be "the last straw" for regarding him seriously, even given its "angry and sarcastic" tone.

I am, to be certain, extremely well aware of each and every one of the points in STG where the language could have been toned down. I do not, however, even remotely share the grossly subjective opinion that the book would have been "significantly improved" had I executed that reduction. On the contrary, following such well-meaning but utterly misled advice would only have significantly diminished the writing.

Obviously, there is no way for me to please everyone in that regard, opinions being what they are. Compare: Several months ago, one reader told me that he felt that the poems in STG, while being "clever and often funny," made it look like I was mocking the guru-figures there—which I basically am—and that the book would therefore implicitly be better without them. In the very same week, however, another reader disclosed that the same haikus were her favorite part of what she had read up to that point! So.... And y'know, even people whose professional work I greatly admire, who have themselves interviewed Wilber, and yet who felt that the STG kw chapter in the rough draft made me "seem a bit obsessive" about the "Bald White Whale of consciousness studies," have contrasted that with the rest of the book, where they felt that I was being "very clear-eyed," rather than sarcastic or visibly angry.

One further cannot help but wonder why anyone who acknowledges that the fraudulent and self-deluded spiritual authorities in our world are worthy of disdain, would nevertheless find that too much sarcasm directed at them quickly "got on his nerves." A reasonable guess might start with the fact that both the school system and the military are very effective at teaching their members that (i) if leaders are to be criticized at all, it must be done respectfully, rather than with sarcasm or anger; and (ii) as one gives respect to one's superiors, so one will also receive it from those below oneself in the hierarchy. Spend enough time in either of those environments, and you could easily find yourself bothered (e.g., for subconscious fear of ensuing punishment) by sarcasm directed toward any authority-figures, including those in the spiritual world, even while acknowledging that those latter ones deserve it. (As every psychologist knows, if we find anyone else's behaviors getting on our nerves, that is not a comment only on the other person. So, why be bothered by someone disrespectfully making fun of spiritual authority-figures?) Hence, the asserted need for "professional detachment" when critiquing even the worst of the authorities/abusers in the spiritual world.

Every reader will implicitly assume that my state of mind, in anger or otherwise, was comparable to what his/hers would have been had he written the same things. So, if someone sees my detailed criticisms of Wilber's character and work as being comparable to "griping about my ex-wife with whom I've had a nasty divorce" ... well hey, I've never been married. Likewise, if anyone experiences STG as being a difficult read, for being "unrelentingly negative" ... well, it's never struck me in that way.

So, a lot of those negative perceptions, I think, are basically "in the eye of the beholder" and should, if they are going to be mentioned at all, be explicitly qualified as being mere personal opinions, rather than presented as if they were objective truths.

For myself, I will rather go with the informed opinion of one particular scholar, whose work I deeply admire, who has found STG to be "academic" enough that he has expressed interest in using it as a required text in one of the courses he teaches (and as an ancillary in another), and who has characterized the much-spicier material on this blog as being done with a sense of humor which is "wickedly spot-on." I like that. A lot.

And please note that, like the issues with Dashh, below, if the above-perceived "flaws" in STG were actually present in the book, I could say nothing against them, except to admit "My bad." Only because the attempted critiques miss the mark on all of the above points have I needed to spend this time refuting them.

Ken Wilber has been referencing child developmental psychologist Jean Piaget's work since his (kw's) early-'80s books The Atman Project and Up from Eden. And I see now that Chapter 11 of his A Brief History of Everything has this to say regarding Piaget's concrete operational and formal operational stages:

Around the age of 11-15 years in our culture, the capacity for formal operational awareness emerges (this is "formop" on figure 5-2). Where concrete operational awareness ["conop," from around age seven] can operate on the concrete world, formal operational awareness can operate on thought itself. It's not just thinking about the world, it's thinking about thinking....

There's also a classical [sic] experiment that Piaget used to spot this extremely important emergence or paradigm shift or worldview shift. In simplified versions: the person is given three glasses of clear liquid and told that they can be mixed in a way that will produce a yellow color. The person is then asked to produce the yellow color.

Concrete operational children will simply start mixing the liquids together haphazardly. They will keep doing this until they stumble on the right combination or give up. In other words, as the name implies, they perform concrete operations—they have to actually do it in a concrete way.

Formal operational adolescents will first form a general picture of the fact that you have to try glass A with glass B, then A with C, then B with C, and so on. If you ask them about it, they will say something like, "Well, I need to try all the various combinations one at a time." In other words, they have a formal operation in their mind, a scheme that lets them know that you have to try all the possible combinations.

Hold on to your hats: Wilber's actually managed to get that almost right, believe it or not. Except that Piaget, in his own books, actually described using five glasses of clear liquid—labeled "A" through "E"—not three!

Presumably, that odd misrepresentation on kw's part was another fine example of him "deliberately" fucking up, in a merely "popularized" book. So, non-layperson audiences might be quoted four glasses, while a graduate-level integral psych textbook written by Wilber himself—God help us—would briefly mention the actual use of five whole glasses ... but only in a tiny-font endnote, to be saved for a "second reading," so as to not overtax his readers on the first pass through.

But ... M.I.T.'s Seymour Papert, inventor of the LOGO (Turtle) programming language and math-learning environment, in his Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas, had this to say about the individual's evolution from the conop to the formop stage:

What is the nature of the difference between the so-called "concrete" operations involved in conservation [e.g., where the results of counting do not depend on the order in which the relevant objects are counted, or where the volume of a liquid remains the same whether it's in a tall or a short glass] and the so-called "formal" operations involved in the combinatorial task? The names given them by Piaget and the empirical data suggest a deep and essential difference. But looking at the problem through the prism of the ideas developed here gives a much different impression.

From a computational point of view, the most salient ingredients of the combinatorial task are related to the idea of procedure—systematicity and debugging. A successful solution consists of following some such procedure as:

1. Separate the beads into colors.
2. Choose a color A as color 1.
3. Form all the pairs that can be formed with color 1.
4. Choose color 2.
5. Form all the pairs that can be formed with color 2.
6. Do this for each color.
7. Go back and remove the duplicates.

So what is really involved is writing and executing a program including the all-important debugging step. This observation suggests a reason for the fact that children acquire this ability so late: Contemporary culture provides relatively little opportunity for bricolage [i.e., do-it-yourself "experimentation"] with the elements of systematic procedures of this type. I do not mean to say that there are no such opportunities. Some are encountered; for example, in games where a child can create his own "combinatorial microworlds." But the opportunities, the incentives, and the help offered the child in this area are very significantly less than in such areas as number. In our culture number is richly represented, systematic procedure is poorly represented.

[Endnote: Of course our culture provides everyone with plenty of occasions to practice particular systematic procedures. Its poverty is in materials for thinking about and talking about procedures. When children come to LOGO they often have trouble recognizing a procedure as an entity. Coming to do so is, in my view, analogous to the process of formation of permanent objects in infancy and of all the Piagetionly-conserved entities such as number, weight, and length. In LOGO, procedures are manipulable entities. They can be named, stored away, retrieved, changed, used as building blocks for superprocedures and analyzed into sub-procedures. In this process they are assimilated to schematic or frames of more familiar entities. They then acquire the quality of "being entities." They inherit "concreteness." They also inherit specific knowledge.]

I see no reason to doubt that this difference could account for a gap of five years or more between the ages at which conservation of number and combinatorial abilities are acquired.

The standard methodology for investigating such hypotheses as this is to compare children in different cultures. This has, of course, been done for the Piagetian stages. Children at all the levels of development anthropologists have been able to distinguish, and in over a hundred different societies from all the continents, have been asked to pour liquids and sort beads. In all cases, if conservation and combinatorial skills came at all, conservation of numbers was evidenced by children five or more years younger than those evidencing combinatorial skills. Yet this observation casts no doubt on my hypothesis. It may well be universally true of precomputer societies that numerical knowledge would be more richly represented than programming knowledge. It is not hard to invent plausible explanations of such a cognitive-social universal. But things may be different in the computer-rich cultures of the future. If computers and programming become a part of the daily life of children, the conservation-combinatorial gap will surely close and could conceivably be reversed: Children may learn to be systematic [a purportedly distinguishing characteristic of formop, and one standard experimental "proof" that a child is at that stage of development] before they learn to be quantitative [in conop]!

And note: Papert worked with Piaget himself for five years in Switzerland, from 1959 to 1964; he knows what he is talking about on this subject, as no one in Wilber's integral community ever will. For my own money, I'd bet dollars to Krispy Kreme donuts that he's absolutely right about all of the above.

Of course, there are many aspects of formop thought which cannot be reduced to the systematic/combinatorial manipulation of concrete or even of abstract objects.

Still, "after twenty-five years [of Wilber's published 'expertise'], it's nice to know."

[M]ost of [the Integral Center crowd] meditate, so they can speed up this evolution in their own cases (p. 293).

Moreover, empirical research has consistently demonstrated that meditation can induce vertical transformation in adults—a shift upward of two or three levels of consciousness (p. 415).

The supporting evidence which Wilber provides for those claims is, of course, abundantly documented nowhere in that book. Not even in the endless Sidebars and Endnotes, rife with one-dimensional professors with shiny teeth, maniacally hopping back and forth across their respective fictional lecture platforms.

The following related assertion, in Wilber's One Taste journals, is equally lacking in supporting evidence:

The whole point of authentic contemplation is simply to accelerate the growth, development, or evolution from the subconscious to the self-conscious to the superconscious dimensions of your own Being. We now have abundant evidence the meditation does not alter or change the basic stages of the development of consciousness, but it does remarkably accelerate that development. Meditation speeds up evolution. It accelerates the remembering and the re-discovery of the Spirit that you eternally are. Meditation quickens the rate that acorns grow into oaks, that humans grow into God.

The Bald One makes comparable claims in The Eye of the Spirit:

Aurobindo's point is that meditation (or spiritual practice in general) can accelerate—but not alter the form or sequence—of this developmental unfolding (p. 245).

Meditation can profoundly accelerate the unfolding of a given line of development, but it does not significantly alter the sequence or form of the basic stages in that developmental line. Streams flow faster, but through the same waves (p. 248).

What we will likely find, as we have thus far, is that meditation accelerates but does not alter the sequence or form of these various lines (p. 249).

The closest that Wilber comes, in any of his books, to providing any actual evidence to support any of the above claims is in the same Eye of Spirit:

[U]nlike most of the meditation teachers in this country, [Charles N. "Skip"] Alexander and his colleagues have been taking standard test of the various developmental lines (including Loevinger's ego development, Kohlberg's moral development, tests of capacity for intimacy, altruism, and so on) and applying them to populations of meditators, with extremely significant and telling results. The importance of this line of research is simply incalculable.

Yet, the endnote associated with that same set of complimentary statements offers these significant caveats:

This is not to overlook what appear to be some valid criticisms of some of the TM research [performed by Skip Alexander], including occasional bias in the researchers, inadequate methodology, and obliviousness to negative effects on practitioners. But even when those inadequacies are taken into account, what's left of the research in still quite impressive.

One might have hoped that such highly relevant information might have been featured prominently in the text, rather than being consigned to a tiny-font endnote. Such "valid criticisms" and "inadequacies"—i.e., red flags such as "occasional bias in the researchers, inadequate methodology, and obliviousness to negative effects on practitioners"—after all, might well be sufficiently disturbing for one to reasonably reject Alexander's TM research altogether. (Indeed, given Wilber's willing acceptance of aspects of that research which he wants to believe, one cannot help but wonder how much worse the research would have had to be before it was worthy of rejection. Knowing the dismally low standards of proof in transpersonal and integral psychology, one can only assume: "A lot.")

Further, regarding the admitted "negative effects on practitioners" of meditation: Why did kw not alert his readers to the details of such potential negative effects? Would such warning not have been merely ethical, given his continuing encouragement to others to take up meditative practice, even to the point of presenting that practice as a "moral imperative"? It is difficult to give voluntary informed consent, after all, when information is being withheld from oneself by persons whom one trusts to at least get that much right.

The ex-TM teachers and practitioners at TranceNet, however, have provided exactly such ethical warnings. From which:

• 76% of long-term meditators experience psychological disorders—including 26% nervous breakdowns
  
  
• 63% experienced serious physical complaints
  
  
• 70% recorded a worsening ability to concentrate
  
  
• Researchers found a startling drop in honesty among long-term meditators

The TM movement attempted to suppress this report in German courts, but its findings were upheld [in 1989] by the German high court.

• Warning: Meditating may be hazardous to your health by Sandy Brundage
  
  
• Subjective Reports by Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan
  
  
• TM Dissenter's FAQ
  
  
• Is Meditation Good for You? by Susan Blackmore
  
  
• Research Demonstrating Harmful Effects From TM
  
  

You might wanna know those sort of things before caving in to Wilber's pressures to meditate—and his quoting of research showing the purported "good effects" of meditation on similar practitioners of the same methods of meditation—huh?

Interestingly, the CD and audio cassette programs of kw's Kosmic Consciousness talks that are sold by Sounds True contain the following phrase: "... and I mention Skip Alexander who was a real genius and a real pioneer in this, and I still recommend looking into his work." That seven-second phrase, however, has been skillfully deleted from the online audio sample of the same audio program, on the Sounds True website.

Richard Nixon would be proud. Or, for the "sounds of silence," so would Simon and Garfunkel.

And don't even get me started on how little it takes to be a "real genius" in transpersonal and integral psychology. The average housecat....

Wilber continues, in the same Kosmic Consciousness audio program:

[I]n the average adult human being, roughly ages twenty-five to fifty-five, there's just no growth at all. It's just very hard. There are exceptions, but for the average person, there's just not much vertical growth going on....

But what happens is, you take any number of valid measurements of growth and development, what we are calling developmental lines, whether Jane Loevinger, or Clare Graves, or Kohlberg and so on, and you take a group of people meditating, and you give them these measurements before, during and after, and you see if there is any actual vertical growth on the scale....

[I]f you take people who are [raising kids and making money] and they meditate about a hour a day, then about four years later, they're two stages higher on any scale that we give them. Meditation is the only thing that's been empirically demonstrated to vertically move people to that degree....

It's the only thing that's been demonstrated to move them into higher moral stages. Not as a belief, but as an actual concrete realization.

Impressive, huh? But the only "proof" which kw ever gives of such claims comes, again, from the endnotes in The Eye of Spirit, where we learn:

For example, 1 percent of a college control sample scored at Loevinger's highest two stages (autonomous and integrated), whereas in a similar sample of regular meditators, 38 percent reached those stages....

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

There is nothing in the above summary, however, to indicate that the quoted years of meditation were what caused the people to rise in psychological development. Rather, it simply states that some meditators scored higher than a control group.

Wilber's exposition then leaves one wondering: Does the original research describe an experimental methodology whereby people are tested to establish a baseline, then they meditate an hour a day for four years, then they are re-tested, and lo and behold, they're now one or two levels higher? And was that done against a control group, who did no meditation? (Or, even better, to account for the influence of "expectation effects" in the test group, were members of the control group given an 'antimeditation' technique—such as pacing and focusing on problems—but told that it was a "meditation" which would have the same anticipated effects of psychological growth?) And were the members of the test and the control group randomly assigned from the pool of subjects? (Compare David Holmes' critique of TM meditation research, esp. his Points #5 and #6. Also, see the "'Studies Have Shown'..." area at TranceNet.)

Short of such an adequate methodology, Wilber's own description of Alexander's studies indicates only that people at the highest stages of Loevinger's scale of ego development tend to meditate, not that meditation is what caused them to be in those high stages. That is a correlation, at best, not a cause-effect relationship; it could just as well be that independent evolution to the highest stages of Loevinger's scale of ego development was what caused the same people to begin meditating, or that something else caused people to both grow/evolve/develop to the highest stages of Loevinger's scale and to meditate. (Consider the longitudinal study of Harvard graduates that discovered a strong positive correlation between regular physical exercise and low rates of morbidity/illness and mortality/death. The common, superficial interpretation was that regular physical exercise keeps people healthy and alive. But critics later suggested another interpretation: you have to be healthy [and alive!] to exercise.)

So, what do you figure the odds are that the "Cueball of consciousness studies" has failed to distinguish between correlation and causality in all this, in spite of his colloquial presentation of Alexander's studies as following a proper methodology? The only way to settle that methodological point would be to track down a copy of Alexander's out-of-print and mondo-expensive The Higher Stages of Human Development, and hope that the experimental write-ups reasonably match what actually went on in the lab. (Guess that's a "rainy-day project" for someone, huh?)

Short of that verification, knowing Wilber and his documented history of intellectual dishonesty, he could just as easily be making it all up out of thin air. Seriously. After all, if he really had solid references to repeated, peer-reviewed studies, done with proper methodologies, that clearly proved his point(s), don't you think he'd be shouting that from the rooftops, and providing the easily accessible details in his books? As much as he provably misrepresents and even outright invents data to support his own flighty ideas—e.g., in his credulous endorsing of the Maharishi effect, and associated claim that skeptics recognize it as being a verified phenomenon (they don't)—and then confidently displays it as if it were real, if he actually had experimental support for his transpersonal notions, how would you ever shut him up?

Even if kw hasn't confused correlation with causation, though, he's still basing an awful lot of the practical side of his "integral religion" on a few admittedly flawed studies. As a basis for either a science or a philosophy, that is a miserably inadequate approach. Further, even if all of that were to turn out to be valid—and even if meditation, in spite of its frequent negative side-effects, were to measurably advance one's psychological evolution—there's still no necessary paranormal claim to any of that. That is, it still does nothing to substantiate the purported reality of the transpersonal levels of Wilber's four quadrants.

From James Randi's exposition as to why he chose to take American citizenship in 1987:

In 1973, I'd been touring with the Alice Cooper "Billion Dollar Babies" show, and while in Niagara Falls, Canada, I discovered something about my country that both disappointed me and brought about my decision to become an American. In mid-show, going backstage to change my costume at the locker-room where we'd been placed at the venue, I found a group of thugs prying open lockers and throwing personal belongings — including my own — in every direction. The destruction was heavy, and I of course objected strongly. I was backed up against a wall — at gunpoint — and told that I had no right to be there. I was escorted out of the building.

No, I couldn't object to the law. That was the law. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) — the equivalent in Canada to the FBI in the USA — were searching the artists' property for evidence of drugs while those artists were supposed to be onstage, and though they found nothing, they destroyed that property and simply left all the trash where they'd thrown it. I was able to get back into the building, unseen by the police, through a side entrance, and I hastened onstage on cue, though not garbed as I should have been.

The following day I arose early and went to the local newspaper office. After much shuffling back and forth, I got to see a feature writer and explained what had happened the previous night. The reaction was a surprise: I was clearly informed that the newspaper wanted no trouble with the RCMP, that the story was already written, that the police action was not part of that story, and that I had better treat the situation as a learning experience. I'm a quick learner.

I chose to be an American.

Interesting. But, to be fair, consider this "sauce for the gander," in the experiences of the Canadian band Lighthouse, at the Atlantic City Pop Festival in August of 1969:

Just as Lighthouse was about to go on, the festival's sound system broke down, delaying the concert as techies frantically tried to get it up and running. With the crowd starting to turn ugly, promoters sent Lighthouse leader Skip Prokop out to try and talk them down. Someone in the crowd called out, "Do you guys up in Canada get drafted?" No, we don't, Prokop answered. A suddenly quiet crowd, with Vietnam weighing heavily on their minds, then engaged Prokop in a forty-minute dialogue about Canada's politics and its attitudes toward draft dodgers....

The band's anti-war opinions, however, did not go down nearly so well with the U.S. authorities. Prokop recalls getting a visit shortly afterwards from federal agents. "These guys came backstage to one of our shows," says Prokop. "I can't remember whether they were from the FBI, the CIA or national security. But these dudes made it pretty clear that if I wanted to continue getting an H1 (work) visa in America, I'd better learn to shut my mouth. It was really heavy."

Surprising, eh? That the law-enforcement authorities south of the border would have no more tolerance for freedom of speech or privacy than do those north of it. Go figure. (Ah, and in 1966, David Clayton-Thomas' anti-war song "Brainwashed" had been banned by U.S. radio. Again, go figure.)

To take a (relatively) isolated but highly emotional personal incident such as Randi's, above, and have it tower over all of the objective issues would could reasonably influence one's choice, is anything but rational. To not see that, in one's own re-telling of the story, is predictable, but worse. "Believers" do very much the same thing when they elevate mere coincidences to the status of meaningful synchronicities, and cannot be talked out of that with any amount of reason.

"Amazing," indeed.

If you're going to go changing your citizenship every time you have a negative experience with the law-enforcement authorities in any country, and where the news media just cover their own asses in avoiding your little controversy, where exactly are you eventually planning on living? The North Pole? Mars, maybe?

Well, well, well. This piece of daft credulity was just brought to my attention, from page 433 of Ken Wilber's "intentionally bad" novel, Boomeritis—originally written as a non-fiction work by kw—with the Jonathan character speaking:

There is a very large body of empirical evidence showing that when 1% of the population of a town, say, begins to meditate, then crime statistics all go down sharply. Murder, rape, theft, they all go down. It's called "the Maharishi effect," and even skeptics admit that it's a real phenomenon. The best explanation is ... that when people touch third tier, it acts as a magnet for others. So you can extrapolate that to its conclusion: it's as if, once a significant number of individuals awaken to this Omega point, then it will create a type of intense center of gravity that sucks all other states into this cosmic consciousness, that helps pull all people into a spiritual awakening, which is actually awakening to their own true Self.

"Even skeptics admit that it's a real phenomenon"? Baloney! But what did you expect, by now, from the "Pinocchio of consciousness studies," if not to simply make stuff up out of thin air to suit his own half-baked theses? 'Cause skeptics don't regard the "Maharishi effect" as being a real phenomenon. Not even close. (Members of the Maharishi's university, though, have given their own "detailed rebuttal" to that afore-linked skeptical critique of their "voodoo science.") Prominent skeptic James Randi, in fact, had given a debunking of that purported effect as early as 1982, in his Flim-Flam!. Martin Gardner, likewise, in 1995, dismissed the Maharishi effect as being "supported, of course, by highly dubious statistics."

Randi and Gardner were voted as being the top two "outstanding skeptics" of the twentieth century, in the same issue of Skeptical Inquirer where Wilber's The Marriage of Sense and Soul was given a tolerant review. That same review has since been touted by Wilber's own integral camp—without reference, of course, to the devastating problems noted there with kw's purportedly "scientific" but actually fully uncontrolled view of meditative experiences—to show that he is being taken seriously by skeptics who normally excoriate the writings of New Age believers. If the same skeptics knew more about Wilber's work, though, they would treat him more like the New Age, Q-Link endorsing doofus that he is. And rightfully so.

If you want to know how little Wilber's name and work are respected in the skeptical community even now, consider that, in the autumn of 2001, when I attempted to interest James Randi in testing Wilber's own brain-dead parapsychological claims in the JREF One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, I simultaneously informed him that kw was considered to be "at the top of his professional field." I also informed him that Wilber had served on the same Board of Editors of The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology as does Stanley Krippner, with whom Randi works regularly.

Randi responded tersely that he had "never even heard of" Kenny-Boy, and expressed his disdain at the prospect of having to "chase after" Wilber (and after the spiritual healer Barbara Ann Brennan, whom he had equally not heard of). That response was given even while Randi was simultaneously and explicitly "chasing after" many others, with regard to their potential participation in the same Challenge. The clear implication there was of course that, given Randi's own high position in the skeptical world, if Wilber were anyone of note, Randi would already be familiar with his work.

Of course, since Wilber's aforementioned book was again reviewed in the very same "outstanding skeptics" issue of SI in which Randi was featured so prominently, chances are rather amazingly good that James had actually at least heard of kw's work, even if later having that fact wilber-esquely slip his mind. Brennan, too, has been mentioned briefly in other issues of the same magazine. And yes, however absurd it may be, both Wilber and Brennan are indeed widely regarded as being at the top of their respective "professional" fields by their (leprechaun-believing) peers. (A simple Internet search could have verified that, in a mere few minutes of minimal effort.)

Spirituality and the New Age, after all, do not begin and end with Sylvia Browne, John Edward, James van Praagh or Shirley MacLaine. Yet, the skeptical world in general is entirely unaware of Wilber's New Age work, or even of transcendent spirituality in general. (Search through skeptical critiques of spirituality/religion/theism in any of its forms for even a single mention of witnessing self-awareness or the nondual One Taste state. If Randi, Gardner, Shermer, et al., have even heard of it, they're keeping mum. Yet that always-already "state," whether or not it is ontologically real, is what genuine spirituality, with or without any paranormal component, is about!) Conversely, though, kw himself is, to the same huge degree, thoroughly unaware of what the real science in properly testing parapsychological claims—including his own—looks like. (Consider his juvenile commentary on a recent astrology debate. No one with any working knowledge of skepticism, on a topic whose degree of validity was settled long ago, would get so childishly excited about so very little ... much less have "remained agnostic" until nearly the turn of this century about whether or not astrology works! [It doesn't.])

So there is indeed an intermittent factual basis, in the above regards, for the idea that skeptics test and debunk only the weakest of the spiritual gene pool. (Although, when someone like the purported thought-photographer Ted Serios is quoted as an example of the "strongest" evidence of parapsychological phenomena, they might as well all be among the "weakest.") Far from being a fearful "avoidance" of the likes of Wilber and Brennan, however, that derives simply from the gap between the shirley-esque New Age of which skeptics are widely apprised, versus "serious," wilber-esque spirituality. That the latter contains just as much self-dishonesty, deception of others, and inability to face reality among its practitioners as the former does, is not my fault.

Conversely, though, Randi's e-mailed insistence to me (only a week after admitting that he had "never even heard of either of them") that both kw and Brennan already knew about his Challenge but simply "refused to apply" holds no water at all. Rather, the chances are very good that, just as Randi himself had "never even heard of" either of those two best-in-profession individuals, neither of them knew of his otherwise-famous Challenge. Not that that would make any difference with regard to them having the courage to put their claims to the test. But still, 'tis good to not just make things up as one goes along, in order to quickly dismiss a sincere and respectfully given suggestion, hmm?

"Sauce for the integral goose, sauce for the skeptical gander."

As to the same skeptical man's equally ridiculous, later e-mailed claim to me that the Beatles split with the Maharishi, after rumors of his alleged sexual indulgences became known, simply for practical considerations, in that being associated with that scandal would supposedly have harmed their careers ... please! (Keep in mind, the trip to India occurred not during their clean-cut, early-'60s phase, but rather in February of 1968, after the release of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," and all the controversy which that song generated. It was also well after John's inflammatory statement that the Beatles were "more popular than Jesus Christ.") Aside from the fact that both Ringo and Paul had left the Rishikesh ashram well before that scandal surfaced, there is such a thing as simply becoming disillusioned with one's heroes, without regard to the potential effects of that on one's career! Sheesh!

Randi's wilber-esque claims in those regards, on top of his dismissive ignorance in having "never even heard of" the widely recognized leaders in "real spirituality," put me off of taking the skeptical perspective seriously for more than two full years, from late 2001 to beyond late 2003. (His equal, admitted unawareness of Robert O. Becker's work, and disinterest in informing himself of that in its having "no paranormal claim," didn't help either. Becker has twice been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Medicine. His work is directly relevant to any discussion of the possibility of direct-current magnets having healing effects—a possibility regularly dissed by Randi himself, with justification, in its untenable Florsheim shoe incarnations, etc. Again, when the most respected among our world's skeptics have never even heard of the best of the work done by members outside of their community, and make no effort whatsoever to inform themselves even when presented with it....) Those same talents were also the primary reason why I ended up "thinking my way out of" taking gurus seriously largely via the inconsistencies in their mutually exclusive claims, rather than with any "skeptical" help during those months. Conversely, the overwhelming majority of references to skeptical literature in STG came into that text only after the rough draft was already done.

Regardless, in wrongly claiming that skeptics take the Maharishi effect as being a real phenomenon, Wilber is either showing himself to be as unprofessionally uninformed as usual on that point, or he's taken another big step backward from even a rudimentary comprehension as to what constitutes truth in this world. That is, once again, he's either inexcusably clueless or grossly dishonest; take your pick. (Among ex-TMers, it has long been known that "the probability of the Maharishi Effect Theory [being valid] is very close to zero." See the "Analyzing the Maharishi Effect" section at TranceNet.)

How many times do you have to be misled (whether ineptly or deliberately) by the research-deficient Wilber, before you will deeply understand that you cannot afford to take anything he says "on faith"? How much do you enjoy being deceived, in the name of a delusional "integral religion," by a founder who wouldn't know truth if it bit him on the nose?

The answer, my friend
Is blowin' in the [paranormal] wind

On the topic of the Maharishi, one of the advantages of my being a "guru-stripper" is that I've been privy to a collected series of emails discussing unpublished aspects of Mahesh Yogi's alleged sexual activities during the '60s ... and his consequent "moping around like a teenager" when alleged consorts of his up-and-left to get the hell away from him. Books are apparently in the works in that regard, to likely be published as soon as Ye Olde Yogi "joins the meditators invisible."

Hey, this is priceless. (And free online, too, though with the worst eBook reader I've ever seen.) If you missed Naked Came the Stranger....

Subject: Monkey Business

July 6, 2005

It's a "Buddhist Monkey-Power Amulet" ... or something.  "Spank the monkey," indeed.

---

In response to the discussion at Dashh's blog:

Dashh (and commentators): You hit someone, you expect to get hit back, right?

You trashed (or, rather, ineptly attempted to trash) my writing style, insultingly suggesting that I had not paid sufficient attention in high school in that regard. You called me "tactless." You nebulously accused me of taking quotes from Wilber out of context. You suggested that I had been guilty of doing "pop psych analyses" of kw. You superficially and daftly reduced sixty typeset pages of detailed, devastating criticisms of Wilber to a few "grains of truth."

You threw all of those insults at me, and then you got hit back, forcefully. Predictable, right? If it surprises you that your posting "hit a nerve" (of course it did! d'uh!), you really are absurdly opaque.

If I was over a line, as Matthew suggests, I apologize. But you were over it first, Dashh. Way over, and in no way "skillfully" so.

You will find little in my June 30 online response to you that does not address exactly the points which you first insulted me on—i.e., your own writing style and "skills," your own lack of relevant tact (you missed "Meet The Falkers," etc.) and associated hypocrisy, your own issues with context in that very same posting, and your misunderstandings as to what pop psychology is. (Had you insulted my own social skills and mental equilibrium, then your social anxiety disorder and unfortunate bouts with depression would have been fair targets, too.)

If you (or anyone else) don't like my tone in responding to "first stones" like that ... well, you knew from reading the Norman Einstein chapter in STG that that might be a problem, didn't you? So honestly, what exactly did you expect?

You're no "innocent victim" here, Dashh: You started this.

And if I had wanted to add your name to the list of "ass-lickers" (two words, hyphenated) of Wilber, I would explicitly have done so.

ebuddha: A pop psych analysis on "Faulk"? Go right ahead; has nothing to do with me.

What was that, again, about the importance of attention to detail, in evaluating (e.g.) Wilber's ideas? Oh yeah, that no one can sort competence from incompetence (either in his own or in others' work) without it....

The thing is that, had any of Dashh's attempted critiques of my writing actually been valid, there would have been nothing I could have said in response to them; I would have had to either remain silent, or come out and admit that he was right and I was wrong. It's only because none of his clumsy "slings and arrows" were even close to the mark that there was even the opportunity for me to be "nasty."

What increasingly amazes me about Dashh's postings is that, after foolishly shitting on my writing style for my allegedly having used high-school vernacular in my decomposition of Wilber's rotten work, he's gone and titled his own two relevant, uninsightful blog pieces as "What the Falk?" and "Falk me!"

That same intentional mispronunciation/misuse of my name was a source of great amusement to the mentally deficient older cousins on my mother's side of the family ... back when we were all in the lower grades of elementary school.

So, from what I've seen so far, Dashh's wit, writing, and understanding of philosophy all seem to be on the intellectual level of "ages ten and up."

Milton-Bradley would be proud.

You think you can intelligently critique even Ken Wilber's bumbling and dishonest work from that same low caliber of thought, Dashh? No, you can't. Not even close. You may try, and the people around you may be (and generally are) so close to the same low caliber that they won't know the difference, but you will never succeed.

Were I as sadly lacking in writing skill, cleverness and insight as Dashh obviously is, I would already have referred to him as a "dashh-hole." (Or as "Dashh Gordon," Bumbling Integral Superhero, the "D" on his chest mirroring his marks in high-school English. His symbol, not the lightning bolt, but rather a broken pencil. Stops second-tier, turquoise-collar crime by dashing off "compassionate and respectful" notes to its perpetrators: "Could you please, if it's not too much trouble, consider not taking over the integral world ... etc. Yours Sincerely, Dashh Gordon. P.S. I hope I haven't been disrespectful or uncompassionate in writing this. You rock!") But frankly, it embarrasses me to even post that "witticism"; in any other context, such a sub-par attempt at humor wouldn't even make it "onto paper" with me, much less get past the editing stage. Yet that same level is apparently the best that Dashh himself can manage. How sad.

To quote something which I once wrote regarding Ken Wilber:

We are all allowed our honest mistakes, after all, without being publicly humiliated for them. But when one stoops to using those very same gross errors as a means of ostensibly proving, from the perspective of alleged genius [or purported greater insight], that others ... are guilty of incompetence ... while one simultaneously and utterly indefensibly encourages others to follow one's own "good advice" ... something's gotta give.

Hide behind a bunch of lame self-deprecations if you want, Dashh, but that doesn't change the fact that not one of the insulting criticisms which you attempted of my work was even close to being competently executed. And that reality could not possibly be confined only to that one set of half-baked, grossly bungled opinions on your part.

This little bliss bunny at radnum1@yahoo.com just doesn't know when to quit.

Back on March 11, 2005, she had emailed this bon mot to me, via this website:

From: Leslie Gardner

Funny how you say Brother Dharmananda has a 6th grade reading level when the grammar in your writing is full of mistakes....

Awkward as her phrasing was—"your writing is full of grammatical errors" would have been much better, though still of a wilber-esque degree of hyperbole—I was chagrined to find that there were, indeed, too many grammatical errors in the relevant piece of writing (which has since become part of the second half of the chapter on Yogananda in STG). Touché. Still doesn't make me functionally illiterate, though; and Dharmananda still is.

Since the only stuff I had posted online at that point was with regard to my experiences at SRF's Hidden Valley ashram, there's a pretty good chance that Leslie is one of Yogananda's zombie kin. There would, after all, have been no reason for her to be offended by any of what I had written regarding SRF and HV, unless she had a vested interest in that fucked-up organization and its tubby, if deceased, "God in the flesh."

Then, on April 28, came this tender and compassionate missive, from the same radnum1@yahoo.com address:

From: Lisa

Your music sucked.

So, it's either Leslie or Lisa; who knows.

This, anyway, is interesting. (Check out the publisher on page 2 ... and the connections with the [channeled!] Sri Yukteswar, and with J. Donald Walters' Ananda, and with Eckankar, and with the "hugging avatar" Ammachi, who has elsewhere apparently claimed to be the reincarnation of Yogananda. What to make of all that...? As Newton had it, centuries ago, "I frame no hypothesis.")

Anyway, evidently lacking a life outside of "compassionately" bothering me, Leslie/Lisa now crafted this inspired piece, so clearly suffused with the "divine love" of God and guru:

You suck. Little fag boy with a computer... by the way, your music sucked really bad [sic].

Leaving aside the fact that "sucked really bad" is itself both grammatically incorrect and ambiguous (it was bad at sucking? meaning it was good?), and that she's missing a space before the ellipses—or has an extra one after it—I've already discussed my orientation in the ... To A Nunnery chapter of STG. It's not what Leslie/Lisa thinks it is. And being a best-in-class programmer, I'm somewhat more than just a "boy with a computer." Hell, with the undergraduate research I did into VLSI during my years in electrical engineering, I could just about design a computer from the ground up, given "world enough and time."

My "sucking really bad" music was actually "Featured" on mp3.com, back in the day. So, at least a few people there who actually have a clue in that regard (plus one established music publisher—who has explicitly kept songs of mine on file—and several persons involved with getting soundtracks together) have come to different conclusions than L'il Leslie/Lisa. (Judge for yourself, here.) But then, unlike her, they probably don't believe in whatever version of Santaclausananda she daftly takes as her "divine" guru and spiritual path, and so never had their perceptions so colored by that delusion as hers are.

If you want to know what kind of "divine love" is actually offered by cults such as SRF, this, from Leslie G., is exactly it. As soon as you threaten their "spiritual well-being" by telling the truth about the abusive organization and/or the guru's fradulence (e.g., Yogananda's conning of people with his pulse-stopping parlor trick), all they can do is shit on you, albeit in embarrassingly uncreative and juvenile ways.

Of course, while going through my "hate email" folder, I couldn't help but come across a few other classics. First, from kissmyass@hotmail.com:

From: French Hater

PIECE OF GARBAGE> GET A LIFE!!

I have, for many months now, puzzled over the "French Hater" thing.

I am not French. Not even remotely. Perhaps this geographically impaired fellow is under the impression that, with the nearby province of Quebec being Francophone, therefore I, in some way, even though not living in that province myself, must nevertheless be French, and thus "worthy of hatred."

'Cause, you know, "You want freedom fries with that?"

Ah, and then this one:

From: Gerry H.

Thank God you're no longer at Hidden Valley. Furthermore, thank God the [sic] He weeds out crack pots like you from Hidden Valley. Do us a favor and remove yourself from SRF's temples and gatherings. What an idiot you are. Gerry

Of course, I had already explicitly stated in that same online piece which so initially vexed Leslie/Lisa that I no longer had anything to do with any aspects of SRF. How Gerry could have missed that is not clear.

Check out some other incoherent bliss-bunny ramblings here and here.

From: Dameon

Your book and your website is a complete joke. You sound like your parents beat the shit out of you on a daily basis. Time to seek counseling my friend.

I am not his "friend," but whatever. Plus, only six minutes later, this one, from the same bobble-head:

From: Dameon

Keep your day job as a developer because your authoring skills as a writer suck.

Perhaps his name really is "Dameon." Or perhaps he was trying to be "evil," but misspelled "Damien." Whatever.

And again with the "sucking" fixation. Arrested psychological development at the oral stage, or what?

After all that, I can't help but be reminded of a brilliant Neil Innes song: How Sweet To Be An Idiot (via www.neilinnes.org).

How sweet to be an [integral, bliss-bunny] idiot
As harmless as a cloud
Too small to hide the [spiritual, crown chakra] sun
Almost poking fun
At the warm but insecure untidy [disbelieving, heathen] crowd

How sweet to be an idiot
And dip my brain in [kosmic, divine] joy
Children laughing at my back
With no fear of attack
As much retaliation as a [sex] toy

How sweet to be an [integral, New Age, wilber-esque] idiot, how sweet

I tiptoe down the street
Smile ["millionaire"] at everyone I meet
But suddenly a scream
Smashes through my [cosmic, lila] dream
Fee fie foe fum
I smell the blood of an [ashram] asylum
Fee fie foe fum
I smell the blood of the [Hidden Valley ashram] asylum
Hey you, you're such a pedant
You got as much brain [Dharmananda] as a dead ant
As much imagination as a caravan sign

But I still [divinely, unconditionally] love you, still [cultishly] love you
Oooh how sweet to be an [integral, yogic, wilber-esque, etc.] idiot
How sweet. How sweet. How sweet.

Ommmmm. Shanti. Shanti. Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. Pfffft! Amen.

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