Blog — July, 2006

One of Wilber's fans, as quoted by him back during his "planned meltdown":

Some time ago—I don’t know exactly when—I began reading the Meyerhoff MS and soon thought, "My God! Who pissed in his Wheaties?" I stopped reading when I realized that it was an infantile, unfounded, ad hominem attack [it isn't, not even close], mostly focusing on stuff you had written years ago.

I just stumbled across this page, while researching the trademark information for, yes, Wheaties (registered trademark of General Mills).

I want to order that box, cut off a big, bald cover from one of Kensho's books (which I no longer have since I garbaged them, but maybe I'll get ahold of a used copy of ABHOE), and use it as a conversation piece!

Bonus points for if you can find a picture of the "tween" Kenny from back when he was kaptain of the junior high-skool football team.

And then, just fill it with Wheaties, and start pissing!

Update: Ach, I've just been informed that it's already been done. Sort of. But can you piss in "Special K"? Well, only one way to find out....

Ken Wilber does not use spell check. If he happens to misspell a word [e.g., "resentiment"?], Oxford will simply change the actual spelling of it.

Yeah, and when he obtusely misstates the Pythagorean Theorem, triangles everywhere suffer acute anguish. Heh.

Ken Wilber can divide by zero.

And follow that up with saying that yellow is approximately ten times more efficient than green, but that 10% of the population at yellow would simply be "at least as effective" as 25% at green, when it would rather be four times as powerful.

If you want a list of Ken Wilber's enemies, just check the extinct species list.

Yeah, that or the list of cannibal animals which, in kw's reckoning, contains only three members: rats, weasels, and founding members of I-I.

In an argument between Wittgenstein, Aurobindo, and Richard Dawkins, Ken Wilber would win.

How would Wilber win an argument with Dawkins? By pretending that half-wings don't exist?!

Ken Wilber doesn't read books. He stares them down until he gets the information he wants.

That one's actually quite plausible. It would certainly account for a lot....

And then there are the love letters:

One line in particular struck us as a poetic chord the Komsos [sic] had never heard before: "I am the Buddha we are."

Komedy at its finest. Or, in the case of the semi-dyslexic integral minions, perhaps: "kodemy."

Friday afternoon, I had just boarded a near-empty subway train at Finch Station—the northernmost point of the Yonge Street line, so both of the trains from there go south.

A couple of Middle-Eastern women—looked like maybe a mother and her slim daughter, their heads covered with (obviously religious) scarves on just about the hottest day of the year—come onto the train, and head straight toward me. The older one gets right up into my face.

"Yungblor."

"Huh?"

"Yungblor. Yungblor."

"Sorry, what?"

Then the younger, twenty-ish one in very tight jeans (not that I'm complaining), who can speak English just slightly more clearly, helps out:

"Young. Blur."

"Oh! Yonge and Bloor! Yes!! It does go there!"

It was like the scene from Steve Martin's All Of Me:

Steve: "Can you put Edwina back in bowl?"

Guru: "Backinbowl."

"Yes, 'backinbowl.'"

"Neem!"

"Neem? What does that mean? Oh, first you have to FIX the bowl."

"Fixbowl!"

"Okay, gofixbowl! Gofixbowl! Go! Go!"

From A Trip to Stonesville: Andrew Weil, the Boom in Alternative Medicine, and the Retreat from Science:

Weil tells us that "the history of science makes clear that the greatest advancements in man's understanding of the universe are made by intuitive leaps at the frontiers of knowledge, not by intellectual walks along well-traveled paths." He neglects to add, unfortunately, that to be successful these "intuitive leaps" had to explain all of the relevant observed facts. Intuition can be a valuable tool for interpreting the facts, and even for guessing what the facts will prove to be, but it cannot substitute for the facts. Yet Weil may not agree with this. He asserts that "there exists within us a source of direct information about reality that can teach us all we need to know." Does he mean that this inner "source" need not conform to observed facts? Apparently so, because chapter seven's main thrust is to assert the primacy of intuition over observation. In Weil's mind, intuition, no matter how bizarre and unsubstantiated, rules the day. But if intuition rules, how would we find the truth when one person's intuition conflicts with another's? Weil does not appear to consider that a problem, either....

How does Weil know that any of these alternative methods, or any combination of them, regardless of the way they work, can cure disease? Because he has been told about, or thinks that he has seen, apparent cures of supposedly incurable diseases that could not be otherwise explained. And where is the documented, objective evidence of such cures? There isn't any. We simply must trust Weil's opinion, and the belief of those who report these events to him. Weil's books are full of such stories, none supported by anything resembling scientific evidence.

I can't believe I ever used to take that "alternative medicine" stuff seriously ... along with the Yogananda Claus and Wilber Claus, etc. What the hell was I thinking?

With this for one, and this for two.

I have written a 5000-word response to those pieces, available on Integral World:

Ex-Integral Scholars and Expert Opinions.

Creating that article and the one before it, as posted on IW, cost me nearly thirty hours of my life which I will never get back. And by the end of that, after dealing with Benjamin's seemingly endless wilber-esque screw-ups and opacity, I have indeed directed "condescending and personally insulting remarks" toward him. You would too, having spent the equivalent of more than three working days countering the unsupportable ideas of someone who won't even recognize that his unduly credulous "opinions" can end up doing harm to others.

This is, after all, a religion-addicted man who has been through over a dozen spiritual groups, none of which could ever deliver what they promised to him; and yet he keeps foolishly going back for more. He will, sadly, never actually figure out how much he has been lied to. After all, if he even wanted to know how much he has been deceived, he would long ago have informed himself of the widespread debunkings which have been done of his "brilliant" Wilber, rather than just making a fool of himself on IW with his continuing endorsements of that integral clown, whose ideas fall apart as soon as you start to actually think about them. And with that kind of happy/deliberate blindness to the obvious facts of reality, it is no wonder that for decades he kept getting himself involved with destructive groups ... until finally taking a few weekends of dancing naked in the woods, and a few brutally nonsensical and manipulative books by the likes of Starhawk (which stand up to no "parity test" at all, much less to any "reality-test"), as his "safe religion."

For a while, Benjamin was posting new "insights" on IW about myself, I-I, and Scientology, faster than I could respond. This just about got lost in the shuffle:

I cannot believe that even Geoffrey Falk would say that Integral Institute has anywhere near the cult dangers that are present in Scientology, but then again I certainly would not want to predict what Falk would not claim in regard to the cult and guru dangers of Integral Institute and Ken Wilber.

I have, of course, never even remotely claimed that "Integral Institute has anywhere near the cult dangers that are present in Scientology." While Benjamin may have plausible deniability there, for perhaps simply floating the possibility that I was doing that rather than outright claiming that I was, he had elsewhere said: "There is only one word that I can use to describe the comparison that Falk and others are making of Integral Institute with cults like Scientology and the Unification Church; the word is 'naive.' There is just no comparison—from my own experiences."

A question, though: Are Benjamin's "own experiences" here a way of showing himself to be an "expert" on the subject, or are they simply a well-planned "out" for him to claim that it's all just his own "opinions," which would surely never cause harm to anyone? Given his history, there is no way to know.

I doubt that I had ever even used the words "Wilber" or "I-I," and Scientology, in the same paragraph. I've certainly never suggested that they were of anything close to being equally dangerous to their members. So, the only way I can make sense of that statement by Benjamin is by assuming that it relates to my regarding of both I-I and Scientology as "cults," which is a "comparison" only in the sense that it uses the same word for both, not for regarding the two environments as being equally dangerous, which I do not.

When I grade the Integral Institute at a 4.4 on the Bonewits scale, and in no way quarrel with Benjamin's rating of 8.67 for Scientology on the same scale, how could anyone think that I am claiming that I-I "has anywhere near the cult dangers that are present in Scientology"? Any fool could see that I am not; to Benjamin himself, it should be twice as obvious. (It is exactly for that clear-as-day reason that I still question the extent to which Benjamin's actions/writings there may not indeed be a sneaky attempt to discredit me, while preserving as much as he can of his lingering admiration for the Integral Emperor. That suspicion is only reinforced by his bullshit about not wanting "to predict what Falk would not claim in regard to the cult and guru dangers of Integral Institute and Ken Wilber," i.e., in planting the idea in others' minds that I might indeed be regarding I-I and kw as comparable to Scientology and L. Ron Hubbard, in terms of reported danger to their members, even when I am clearly not doing that. It's a nice little piece of manipulation, though, of a type which probably wouldn't be out of place in many of the spiritual groups on which Benjamin has wasted his time and money, when the latter at least might have been used to do some good in the world. Or did they not caricature their critics as being unpredictable and unreasonable, too?)

But guess what: Just because I-I isn't even half as bad as Scientology doesn't make it safe.

Integral Institute is a cult, even if Scientology is (a much worse) one too. The reason why my own "dividing line" for "cult" versus "non-cult" is lower than Benjamin's or Bonewits'—even SRF, in Benjamin's rating of 3.94, which I have not yet bothered to verify the detailed validity of, is undoubtedly a cult, as its knowledgeable ex-members will be happy to confirm—is simply because I am much more aware of the degree of psychological manipulation and abuse which goes on for the residents in such closed, hierarchical environments, and of the effects which that has on them via the relevant psychological dynamics, than is the average "cult expert" (or even the average irresponsible "opinion"-purveyor).

I am also aware, from my own life, of what it really means to be able to think freely, and of what constraints (e.g., in political correctness) are put on us in that regard even just by society, never mind by the wish to be accepted by one or another religion or special-interest group. And you will, of course, find huge overlaps between the Neopagans and exactly such groups, out to remake the world in their own image by dictating what others are allowed to think or say, or even what questions one can ask without being their version of "damned" for not willingly accepting their grossly biased view of reality. Probably all of that is lost on Benjamin; but if he hasn't seen the obvious sexism, half-truths and manipulation in Starhawk's books, he shouldn't even be having an opinion on the value of the Neopagan path, regardless of his own positive and utterly casual experiences with it. (As it stands, he actually recommends her writings as being among his "favorite books" on Neopaganism!)

It's a group of people with a particular set of biases about what reality should be like, who have banded together in the form of an invented spirituality which just tells them what they want to hear. (Even better, since there is no centralized authority for the tenets of that spiritual path, you can pick and choose from the authorities in the field until you find one who tells you exactly what you wanted to hear from the beginning, without risking your membership or potential for spiritual growth, there.) If you can find value in that beyond encouraging adults to believe in sexist fairy tales, you're doing better—no, much worse—than I am. ("God the Father" is sexist, but "God the Mother" isn't? Baloney!!!)

One can understand, easily enough, why a segment of the female population needs to hear such "truths" as the Neopagans offer, looking for empowerment in the face of existing inequities and finding it in myths and metaphysics which are pure fiction, but which appeal to their "intuition" (i.e., their personal biases and wishes for how reality should look). It is less clear why a man such as Benjamin would find himself so much in resonance with the same ideas. :)

However, operating on the assumption that a number of anti-Wilber proponents will say that Scientology is in a class of cult danger significantly higher than Integral Institute, but that Integral Institute still possesses cult dangers that need to be taken seriously....

... which is exactly the implicit judgment that I have held all along, for the love of L. Ron Fucking Hubbard....

I don't mind intelligent meaningful criticism that pertains to the mathematical ideas that I am writing about, but it does require someone to go through the mathematics in a serious way to do this. It is obvious that Falk did not have the interest or want to take the time to do this, and I think it is an extremely poor model of intellectual criticism to simply denounce something without giving any kind of intelligent explanation whatsoever.

It has nothing to do with the mathematics. When you are creating "integral theories" to explain a view of reality which has little more validity than do fairy tales, by definition your theories will be more nonsense than sense. It doesn't even matter whether they're executed well, or poorly. How much "intelligent explanation" do you need to understand that even a brilliant mathematical formulation (which Benjamin's is not) of an "integral theory" which has been decimated over the past few years will necessarily contain a huge amount of nonsense?

That sort of formulation is exactly what Benjamin is trying to effect, in his own small way: "Utilizing Ken Wilber's Integral theory of levels of consciousness as described in a number of his books ... we shall apply a basic group theoretical mathematical model to describe how a person may shift into higher levels of consciousness." And if Wilber's "Integral theory" is founded on misrepresentations and frequent pure bullshit, as it indeed is ... what then? So, "go through the mathematics in a serious way" all you like, it won't make the "leprechauns" any more real, or the application of "biquasi-groups" to the description of such activities any less truly nonsensical.

So, you see, I am "qualified" to judge that, after all.

Similarly, Falk describes my work as having no original ideas to describe the psychology of cultish organizations and that I utilize old scales that have questionable value. But he has supposedly read my Modern Religions book, and I would contend that my discussion of Pseudo-Realness, comparison of Scientology with Judaism, my Hessian model (based upon German novelist Hermann Hesse) of why people go into modern religions, etc. are certainly my original formulations that I did not "borrow" from anyone.

Have you ever heard the phrase, "what is good is not original, and what is original is not good"? Benjamin has indeed made "original" contributions to the field of cult studies. (So did Velikovsky, to astronomy. Ha!) I stand corrected.

But, read Zimbardo, read Hassan, read Michael Langone's Recovery from Cults anthology, even read Janja Lalich and Margaret Singer. Then read Benjamin's book, or his online papers, and tell me that those offer even a glimmer of "insight," beyond the level of a middling, derivative, weak undergraduate thesis. Just do the research, and you will easily see. Or did you think there was no good reason why I have not included that Modern Religions book in the bibliography of STG, while simultaneously enthusiastically referencing the other, inestimably more valuable publications by Hassan, Langone, and Lalich, etc.?

(What I actually wrote as far as Benjamin's "original ideas" was: "Even if you can't offer meaningful insights into the psychology of cultic groups, etc., instead merely borrowing and applying a patchwork of ideas from other supposed experts [including recognized 'cult apologists'], you should still be able to do proper research." And, in terms of Benjamin's recent postings regarding the "safety" of the Integral Institute, I still consider that to be a completely valid perspective, particularly since the examples he has given of his "original ideas" all refer to other, long-past publications. Anyway, "original ideas" are not the same thing as "meaningful insights." The latter, after all, are not merely original but also good. It doesn't surprise me that Benjamin seems unaware of that distinction, misrepresenting my wish for "meaningful insights" as merely one for "original ideas," the latter of which any "Velikovsky" can offer.)

I also believe that the way I have used the Bonewits Cult Danger Scale in conjunction with the Anthony Typology and what I refer to as the Wilber Integral Model is a creative interplay of a variety of scales and criteria that effectively safeguards against an over-reliance of any one type of measurement.

You say "creative interplay," I say "patchwork." And, "believe" whatever you want; it makes no difference in the face of the cold, hard facts. When two of your three scales/criteria are hopelessly inadequate for doing what they're supposed to do, you would do far better to "over-rely" on the one (Bonewits) scale which actually makes some real sense, and wasn't built "by cult apologists for cult apologists."

Benjamin: "The primary relationship of the Integral model to a description of the cult dangers of new religious movements can be simplified by a generalization of three general categories: pre-rational, rational, and trans-rational. The generalization I have in mind is to add a fourth category in-between pre-rational and rational, which I will call 'pseudo-rational'...."

Exercise for the reader: Argue, if you can, against the idea that all spiritual communities, indeed all religious beliefs, are pre-rational, by any sensible, reality-tested use of that term. Metaphysical and parapsychological claims consistently do not stand up to any sort of thorough questioning—which isn't the same thing as saying that they are all wrong, though it's close. And it's exactly that questioning which is supposed to be the most obvious distinguishing characteristic of a "trans-rational" community, right? But, since proper questioning makes the most cherished ideas disintegrate, the only way to preserve the latter is to disallow the former (as we saw, fairly explicitly, from Wilber himself back in June). So, you can see why "trans-rational" spiritual communities, even in principle, probably can't exist. It all depends on how thoroughly you want, or are able, to question.

Benjamin's own milquetoast "questionings" of Wilber's ideas, where kw was indeed able to laugh off those respectfully given, relatively trivial objections rather than flying into an online rage, only prove that point:

I told Ken his "Calculus Of Indigenous Perspectives" was not correctly named as there was no Calculus in it, and he laughed and said I was right. We talked about the dangers of him becoming a guru and he said that he was insured against this because his good friends constantly tell him how "fucked up" he is. In short, my experience was one where I felt like I was seen, heard, and respected for whom [sic] I am....

Uh-huh. Well, just try cogently criticizing the bedrock of his integral "synthesis," and see how much you are "respected for whom you are," then. It's just so fucking irresponsible for Benjamin to present such trivial questions and responses as if they were comparable to how Meyerhoff, for example, has been treated, for his bringing of a degree of cogency and depth to the critiquing of Wilber's ideas which Benjamin, sadly, will never be able to exhibit. And then, he hides behind the idea that it's all just his own "opinions" and "experiences," so there's no obligation for him to include anyone else's far-less-positive experiences in with his own "subjective" ones. How utterly irresponsible, as if his own "sample size of one" had the same value, the same "truth" all by itself, as does the collective experience of Bauwens, Dallman, Meyerhoff, Visser, Andrew Smith, etc.

I have said many times, completely validly, that Ken Wilber could not be both honest and professionally competent, and yet screw up on basic facts as often as he does. And the research of not merely myself but of a number of other cogent critics (you know, the "anti-Wilber" faction, who are simply prepared to think clearly about the subject and follow the facts through to their logical conclusions) finally pushed him into showing his true colors regarding his (in)tolerance for the questioning of his ideas and authority, in the blatant manipulation of his community via his "Wyatt Earpy" postings.

And now, we have Elliot Benjamin doing his own Rich Little-worthy impression of the Bald Wonder, being unable to state the monistic/dualistic distinction or the nature of the four quadrants competently, unable even to use a simple calculator without screwing up, while he simultaneously grossly misrepresents my position on the safety of the Integral Institute vs. Scientology, with the effect of portraying his "great philosopher" hero in an unduly positive light.

The apple never falls far from the tree, does it? These fools screw up left and right on the simplest things. They misrepresent and caricature their critics' ideas, never quoting directly from the positions which they claim to be countering, to allow themselves to "win" the debates. And then, when they have proved themselves to be utterly unworthy of the term "professional," and begin to be showed the disrespect they so richly deserve, they cry about how unfairly they are being treated by "childish and immature" others, when it is only their own dismal actions which have brought that treatment on themselves in the first place. But, of course, they utterly lack the sense of responsibility to be able to admit that to themselves, or to comprehend the effects which their indefensible actions have on others (e.g., in kw's endorsements of Da and Cohen, and now in Benjamin's incessant apologies for Wilber). Pathetic.

Anyway, by now I understand all-too-well how James Randi must have felt, in trying to reason with Wilber's foolishly admired friend, Gary "Afterlife Experiments" Schwartz.

I am genuinely going to try to not even read any of Benjamin's future online postings, simply because I cannot afford to "spend the rest of my life having this conversation," as Basil Fawlty would put it. I have far too many other things which I need to be doing instead of dealing with people who don't even want to know what's going on in the real world, where, to paraphrase the boys from South Park, we do not merely "sit around licking Barney the Dinosaur's big fat pussy all day. This is real life with real consequences which you take to your grave." No insightful reader would take that (planned) "withdrawal" on my part as deriving from any imagined strength in Benjamin's attempted criticisms and "original ideas," on which I simply cannot afford to waste any more time.

If you've seen the movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin, that's how Benjamin's credulous ideas and dismally failed attempts at cogent debate strike me: As being the cult-studies (and writing-style) equivalent of uninformed musings about "bag[s] of sand," from a man who just won't grow up and start accepting responsibility for his own actions, much less bring any meaningful insight to the field in which, yes, he is clearly trying to make a name for himself, even as he simultaneously gags on the word "expert."

P.S. It was close to two years ago that I forced myself to read the (bound, self-published) manuscript for Benjamin's Modern Religions book, basically just to be "polite." And, I literally threw that in the garbage close to half a year ago. So I can only do this from memory. But, I am convinced (while recognizing the fallibility of memory) that there was a paragraph in that version of the manuscript in which Benjamin wrote something to the effect of: If I believed in reincarnation, I could easily imagine myself having been Einstein in a previous life.

I can only assume that he was referring to Norman Einstein.

Or perhaps I am simply confusing that with some other numbingly repetitive book/manuscript. (Again, one is sometimes too polite when asked, by the author, for one's "review" of a work; so, to avoid unnecessarily hurting another's feelings, one puts a positive spin on something which really only deserves to be reviewed negatively. And then, of course, one simply gets asked for even more favors....)

If my determination to get both "Norman Einstein": The Dis-Integration of Ken Wilber (2007, 210 pp.) and Stripping the Gurus (2007, 545 pp., to be done without the chapter and appendix on Wilber) into (physical) print ever wavers, I will simply think back on all this, and redouble my efforts.

I was looking in more detail at Elliot Benjamin's naïvely optimistic ratings for the "cultitude" of Wilber's Integral Institute. And the more I look at that apologetic analysis, the more it concerns me, to put it politely.

"Wisdom Credited: 6." Wilber is regarded as the "Einstein of consciousness research" even by his peers, never mind his followers, and you think he's only being credited with a 6/10 in wisdom by the latter? Be realistic. Within I-I, this is at least an 8.

"Wisdom Credited," in Bonewits' own definition, is "amount of trust in the decisions made by leader(s)." From anonymous integral followers, then, as quoted by Wilber himself:

I trust the meta-vision you see of human and social evolution, and if this ["Wyatt Earpy"] posting as is serves the Kosmos, then so be it....

I couldn't list all your third-tier reasons for this, but I deeply know that Integral resonates with, and works for, those who are ready for it. It is a truth that doesn't need a prop to stand.

Do those sound like people crediting only a 6/10 to the wisdom of their "third-tier" leader?

Michael Bauwens, formerly a founding member of I-I:

Being integral is increasingly being defined as: "agreeing with Ken Wilber." This is the only critique being accepted within the movement. And basically it takes the form of: yes you are a genius, but wouldn't you consider that xxx.

As I said, this is at least an 8/10.

"Dropout Control: 1." Being the "Intensity of efforts directed at preventing or returning dropouts." When Matthew Dallman "ceased to exist" on Integral Naked after resigning from I-I, do you really think that wouldn't dissuade others from leaving, and risk experiencing the same treatment? (Or, when Premananda was "erased" from SRF—literally airbrushed out of photos of himself and Yogananda, not to mention excised from any mention in the Autobiography of a Yogi—do you honestly think that had no effect on the remaining disciples, in terms of ensuring their loyalty to the organization and continued presence on its "holy" grounds?) The rating of 1/10 was absurd even before Wilber's "Wyatt Earpy" rantings. And after them, with kw's explicit regard for his own community as a "sanctuary"—you wouldn't want to leave our sanctuary, would you? it's uniquely safe in here; have a scone—this is at least a 4.

Then, there is the matter of "Sexual Manipulation" in I-I, which Benjamin grades at the lowest possible level of "1." Oddly, in his comparable analyses of Neale Donald Walsch's Conversations With God, and then of the Avatar training, he says first that the "philosophy of complete individual freedom could have sexual overtones regarding being bi-sexual or even multi-sexual in romantic relationships," and then that "the focus upon individual choice and freedom may have an effect upon decisions in regard to one's romantic and sexual involvements." Well yes; let's hope that it does. But how on earth could allowing "complete individual freedom" and choice ever qualify as "sexual manipulation"? That position strikes me as fairly absurd—its corollary being that those groups would need to place more constraints on their followers in order to be less manipulative! Anyway, Benjamin grades each of those groups as "2" in this category, rather than the lowest value of "1." Wilber's community, by contrast, receives the minimum/best rating from Benjamin in spite of the following long-documented issues:

Matthew Dallman:

[Wilber's] "integralnaked" website was consciously marketed to early 20s men; its early communications were soft porn.

Appropriately, then, from kw's own Integral Naked web forum:

[I visited] Ken’s house with a group of students and [was] surprised by his pantomimed masturbation and his laughing but quite frequent requests for blowjobs from the audience.

So, if the Integral Institute is worse than Avatar and Conversations With God, but not as bad as Zimbardo's simulated prison (which I have graded a 4 in this category), that's a 3 for I-I, in terms of "Sexual Manipulation."

Those additional 7 "Bonewits points" bump the more reasonable rating of I-I up from Benjamin's 3.94 to 4.4. Which is just about exactly my revised rating for Zimbardo's prison environment (without equating authority with wisdom there). So, I was right the first time (don't you just hate it when that happens?): By the Bonewits scale, I-I is indeed comparably dangerous to Zimbardo's prison. (I erred, though, in saying that Benjamin himself regards the two environments as being comparably dangerous, even though he should be expressing exactly that regard.)

Probable ignorance on Benjamin's part of many of the above facts is no excuse: If you want to present yourself as a knowledgeable expert in this (or any other) field, with an opinion that is actually worth hearing, you have a serious responsibility to do your research at an appropriately thorough and professional level. That is so particularly when you are coming out and asserting (unsolicited, no less) that one or another spiritual community is a relatively "safe" one. Even if you can't offer meaningful insights into the psychology of cultic groups, etc., instead merely borrowing and applying a patchwork of ideas from other supposed experts (including recognized "cult apologists"), you should still be able to do proper research. In fact, you should do that all the more, in compensation for the other obvious shortcomings.

For example, minimally adequate research would have disclosed that Wilber's longtime guru-friend is named Andrew Cohen, not "Alan." Yikes.

I'm not sure Benjamin has got the four quadrants right, either: "The main purpose of Integral Institute was to engage people in incorporating the 'four quadrants' of individual (intrinsic), behavioral (extrinsic), cultural, and social in all academic endeavors." By "individual (intrinsic)" he obviously means the subjective or "interior" quadrant (of psychology, etc.), though you basically have to play a game of elimination to figure that out. But how exactly does "behavioral (extrinsic)" equate to the objective exteriors of holons (in physics, etc.)? "Subjective" and "objective" clearly belong together, with regard to interiors and exteriors; but can the same be said, even remotely, for "individual" and "behavioral"? Even if that's not an original misreading/gloss/nomenclature by Benjamin, why couldn't he just stick to the standard, and much clearer, terminology? He screwed up in exactly the same way by wrongly claiming that, in Anthony's typology, "Monistic refers to non-judgmental openness to all people whereas dualistic refers to an Us vs. Them elitist dichotomy." You can't excuse stuff like that just for claiming that you're trying to be "concise": It takes no more bandwidth to express the ideas accurately than it does to misrepresent them.

Here's another thing: Even aside from Benjamin's failure to properly apply the concept of significant figures in his calculations—and we really did all learn that in high-school physics—59 divided by 15 is 3.93 (it obviously rounds down), not 3.94. (You want a calculator to verify that? Fine, here.) Sure, it's just a quarter of a percent difference; but get it right already. Even someone with a Ph.D. in mathematics should be able to use a calculator....

(If you are further able to view Benjamin's "Integrally Informed" paper, "A Mathematical Group Theoretical Model Of Shifts Into Higher Levels Of Consciousness In Ken Wilber's Integral Theory," as being more sense than nonsense, you are doing better [or, more probably, worse] than I am in that regard.)

Regardless, Benjamin quite obviously suffers from an unfounded lingering admiration for Wilber's "complex and brilliant" work, and his "prestigious" AQAL journal. But no one who has read and understood Jeff Meyerhoff's or Andrew Smith's work could still regard Wilber's ideas as being "brilliant"—the time for laughably uninformed evaluations like that has long since passed. In terms of Smith's work, that has actually been true since as early as 2001! What, if any of that, has Benjamin actually read, I wonder.

I don't go around looking for well-meaning people to trash, in cult-studies or elsewhere; I have far too many other things I would rather be doing with my spare time than sinking it (more than fifteen hours on the present topic, at last count) into stuff like this. (I wouldn't even have read Benjamin's piece in the first place if I hadn't recognized his name.) But when someone like Elliot, however sincere (and naïve) he surely is as a human being, takes such a ... well, "wilber-esque" stroll into attempting to analyze cult-like environments as he has done here, it is simply a fact that there will be people who will be fooled into taking his dangerously credulous point of view seriously. And I have to do what I can to prevent that from happening.

(Because of that same urgency, I still haven't done the quantity and caliber of overall research into this which I would otherwise have demanded from myself before going public with it. Worse, because I've rushed through this and relied on Benjamin to at least have gotten his rating of I-I done properly, I now have an article posted on IW that unduly exaggerates the differences between the Bonewits ratings for I-I versus for Zimbardo's prison. The best thing I can say about all that is that it has at least given me a chapter for a future book.)

All in all, with astonishingly credulous "guru-debunkers" like Benjamin, one hardly needs apologists.

So, this is how the thoughts of the past few days look, when posted at Integral World.

I'm still not certain that Benjamin and I are using the same criteria for the categories of "Wisdom [vs. Authority] Claimed" and "Wisdom Credited," and don't have easy access to a copy of Bonewits' Real Magic, in which his Cult Danger Scale was given in detail, to check that out properly. If I could do this all over again, I would do that research up-front, rather than speaking too soon about it, as I have been guilty of doing on some points. (Not that the same couldn't/shouldn't be said at least as strongly about Benjamin's unduly optimistic view of I-I and SRF; which is, after all, what started this exchange, since I could hardly sit idly by and let his dangerously credulous ideas there go unchallenged.)

Aside from the specific score for Zimbardo's prison study on that scale, though, the rest of the ideas seem to me to make sense.

Well, a few more thoughts on Benjamin's IW article:

Any in-group will obviously have something of an "Us vs. Them" mentality toward the rest of the world, regardless of whether it is monistic or dualistic, or cheerleader-istic or geek-istic. It's undoubtedly a pleasant thought to believe that groups which hold that we are all inherently one with God would have less of a split between their own "best" group and the rest of the world, for ostensibly seeing divinity even outside of their own clique. But if one wishes to claim that that's true in practice, one needs to present actual evidence for that claim, rather than just wishful thinking.

In practice, you know, God may be everywhere, but Maya exists much more outside the ashram gates than inside. And as a general principle, whatever you think is keeping you from being enlightened/saved is what you will need to be protected from, regardless of whether you think that God is in everyone or that God is forever separate from His creation. Monistic or dualistic, there, makes no practical difference. (Where would you grade the Integral Institute, with its monistic theology, in terms of Us vs. Them? Anything less than an 8/10 would, I think, be unduly optimistic.)

As far as dualistic religions emphasizing "eternal damnation," versus the supposed inevitable enlightenment of the monistic theologies: The Buddhist hells are every bit as torturous as are the Christian versions, i.e., there is just as much threat of punishment for not doing things "the right way" in your life in the Eastern version as in the Western. And as to the idea that dualistic teachings have more of a "selection process" for who can be saved than do monistic ones: when only "second-tier" beings are eligible to be saved (or even just eligible to be members in the "best" way of doing things), that is an obvious selection or "competitive salvational ordeal" process, just as surely as is the need for acceptance of Jesus as one's Savior.

"Many are called, but few are registered at Integral University," after all.

As to my parenthetical statement that Neopaganism is "fiction-based": I was quite clearly referring there to the information in Charlotte Allen's article, as hyperlinked in exactly that paragraph in my relevant blog: "In all probability, not a single element of the Wiccan story is true," etc. Allen specifically addresses "neopaganism" there, and makes no reference at all to, for example, Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land novel, upon which the truly fiction-inspired Church of All Worlds is based.

Point of trivia: it is from Heinlein's countercultural novel that we get the word "grok." As in, "Not only did I grok what the postmodernists were saying, I have given, in dozens of writings, what numerous experts and specialists in the field (including experts on Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, among others) have called some of the best, and in a few instances, THE best, treatment of these topics"—Ken Wilber.

I have not read Heinlein, in any context. I have, however, read at least one of the "Witchy" neopagan Starhawk's unintentionally fictional books. (From footnote #30 in Benjamin's "Spirituality and Cults" piece it is obvious that he has, too, listing her Spiral Dance there as one of his favorites, among numerous other works of obvious unintentional nonsense.) And given the information disclosed in Allen's piece, any group endorsing the "Goddess-worship" of Starhawk, etc., merits no more than a denigration of taking manipulative fiction as fact, for that is exactly what they are doing. (I would say exactly the same thing about any group agitating for worship of "God the Father," by the way. It's equally childish fairy tales, taken as if they were real.)

Incidentally, I don't doubt that the Neopagans are one of the safer spiritual groups around. It doesn't make their beliefs any less "fictional," though. But, as to Benjamin's idea that their "Wisdom Claimed" merits only a "1" rating: please! Again, just try even being politically incorrect around those people; they enforce their "wise" ideas mightily on others, even if they can't necessarily agree amongst themselves as to what the core ideas are! I repeat that I worked among such individuals not merely for a few "weekend festivals in the woods," but for nearly a full year. I know very well, from my own experience, how little questioning one can advance against their ideas before one becomes "part of the problem." If there were such a thing as a "Mean Green Meme," that is where you would find it.

When "cult experts" such as Benjamin vouch for the safety of environments such as SRF or I-I, there are people who take that opinion seriously. It is in no way good enough to simply be willing to say, years after the fact, "Oops, I was wrong again." You're not Britney Spears, and no one else should have to suffer for your unduly credulous evaluations as to the "safety" of various spiritual movements.

Benjamin himself again rated the Integral Institute as being more dangerous than SRF, even while presumably being happily unaware of the depression and suicidal tendencies which the latter environment has brought out in its most unfortunate monastic participants. So, what do you think he might be equally unaware of inside I-I?

By the way, nearly a month ago I apprised Steve Hassan of Wilber's recent actions. He expressed much more concern about all of that than Benjamin has, to the point of discussing the matter with a fellow cult-debunker, who in turn (naïvely) hoped to meet with kw personally, to "reality-test" him.

What does that tell you about the likely validity of the idea that there is not "anything serious enough to be very alarmed about" in Wilber's community?

Comparably, if Benjamin had done his past spiritual workshops at Kripalu Yoga Center while Yogi Amrit Desai was still leading that environment (and allegedly sleeping with three of his female followers), would he have given it the same "Favorable" evaluation as he has? My guess is that, being unaware of that behind-the-scenes reported abuse, he would have naïvely, with all sincerity, done exactly that.

Again, people take such recommendations seriously. Giving unsolicited, trusting analyses based on the assumption that "what you don't see isn't there" is simply not good enough, when the abuse is so predictable to anyone who understands even the most basic principles of social psychology. It is, however, exactly what happens when one wants, far too much, for there to not merely be "safe" spiritual organizations in the world, but ones offering "the Truth" on top of that.

P.S. In trying (unsuccessfully) to find out who the "critic" (friend?) was who credited Wilber's chapter on postmodernism in The Marriage of Sense and Soul as being "the best short introduction to postmodernism available," I came across this noteworthy blog. And, through it, this fantastic pre-review of Wilber's forthcoming Integral Spirituality.

• Sexual Manipulation: of members by leaders(s), amount of control over the lives of members. Well, you're not supposed to be having sex with your fellow inmates in a (simulated) prison. But that's hardly an unreasonable "sexual manipulation": It's not that "you shouldn't have sex because God doesn't want you to," or that "you should have sex with me (the leader) because God wants you to." Still, prisoners were actually stripped naked—being allowed no underwear to begin with—and at least once forced to simulate sodomy on one another by the guards. Call it a 4.

• Endorsement Of Violence: when used by or for the group or leader(s). There was much sadism exhibited by Zimbardo's guards, particularly when they thought they weren't being watched. But, they were explicitly forbidden from using physical violence (which is surely what this criterion refers to, as opposed to "psychological violence" or manipulation) to keep their "prisoners" in line. (The guards carried billy clubs, but were to use those only as symbolic weapons, not as actual ones. On at least one occasion, though, a prisoner was hit lightly on the chin with such a stick, after having [laughingly] grabbed the throat of a guard. The guards also used fire extinguishers to help quell the second-day prisoner uprising, and at one point force-fed a prisoner.) Thus, a 4.

• Dropout Control: intensity of efforts directed at preventing or returning dropouts." If this had been a real prison, the value would clearly be 10: you cannot be allowed to (literally) escape/leave. But it was only a simulated prison, where both the guards and the prisoners knew, going in, that they could "walk out any time." Of course, the prison management "thought of luring #8612 back on some pretext and then imprisoning him again because he was released on false pretenses." But, they never actually acted on that, so the other prisoners couldn't have known of the possibility. Also, in practice, the other prisoners' guard-instructed chanting that the ill and hysterical #819 was a "bad prisoner" had the unintended and unpredicted effect of making the prisoner in question want to return to his group, to prove that he wasn't the bad prisoner which they made him out to be. Such a dynamic could certainly be used as an effective form of "dropout control"—but it does not appear to have been thus utilized in the study, beyond the initial, unintentional application of it. But, when a "prison break" was rumored to be on the verge of occurring, Zimbardo and his staff certainly took steps to prevent that from happening, i.e., to ensure that the prisoners would not drop out of the group. Overall, though, you could indeed leave, simply forfeiting your pay for participating in the study, with no other objective negative repercussions for doing so. (Of course, the forfeiting of that pay, as opposed to one's being given a pro-rated amount, would also act to keep individuals bound to that environment.) And, when push came to shove, Zimbardo and his colleagues did release five of the ten original prisoners voluntarily, one-by-one, after four of them had broken down and another had developed a psychosomatic rash. Perhaps a 7, then.

So, with those revisions the overall Bonewits rating becomes 68 / 15 = 4.5. Or, even if you could find another, say, 10 points among the "Wisdom Claimed" and "Wisdom Credited" scores, it's still only up to 5.2. (There should be only two significant digits in any of these averages: A summed group of estimated measurements having only two significant digits each [e.g., 1.0 + 2.0 ...] divided by an integer value which has no uncertainty, should only have two significant figures for the result. Because, "When multiplying or dividing measurements, the answer should contain the same number of significant digits as the measurement with the least number of significant digits." So, a score of "3.94" is 3.9. We learned this in high school, right?) A significantly higher score than I-I, to be sure, possibly even officially in the "mild to moderate cult danger" region, but hardly "through the roof," by comparison.

(If one were to score any of the above much higher than I have, one would then have little room at the upper end of the scale to differentiate between degrees of abuse in genuinely "omniscient," sexually manipulative, violent, or dropout-controlling environments. And even the worst of what occurred in Zimbardo's study is assuredly mild compared with what goes on in real prisons and in the worst of our world's cults.)

That spirit-killing prison, having one-third of its 15 indicators definitely at the lowest possible rating, and explicitly being just an "experiment" in "nonviolent" confinement with no doctrine taught by the leaders other than the importance of obedience to them, could never be more than around a 5 out of 10, overall, in terms of "danger" evaluated via the Bonewits scale.

And note also that, while all of the "questionable" aspects of the behaviors of the subjects in Zimbardo's prison study were thoroughly documented—allowing and necessitating a nuanced analysis of all that—no such thing is true of places like SRF or I-I. Indeed, it is exactly the most negative aspects of the community which will be covered up when anyone from "outside" is visiting. So, if one merely goes from one's experiences as a casual member in any spiritual group, it is a fair bet that one will, on the average, be grading its "dangerous" aspects too low rather than too high, simply for being ignorant of the full depth of the abuses and manipulations (as Benjamin demonstrates in his own "Neutral" analysis of SRF). To give such groups the "benefit of the doubt" on top of that when they score toward the upper end of the "Neutral" range or otherwise is disconcerting, to say the least. One should rather be assuming, if anything, that things are worse than one can see from any casual (non-full-time, non-residential) involvement.

Whatever number one decides on for that simulated prison, though, I-I is still more dangerous than the "depression and suicide-inducing" SRF, by Benjamin's own analysis. Consequently, his regard for Wilber's community as being a "safe" one is simply not defensible.

I came home yesterday to a new Integral World newsletter, featuring an article by Elliot Benjamin.

Elliot and I exchanged manuscripts close to two years ago, after he had met Steven Hassan at the 2004 International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) conference in Edmonton, thereafter being referred to me by Hassan, for our common interests. He is certainly a sincere individual, who has participated in (by my recollection) around 15 New Age-ish groups, from est and Scientology to SRF, with varying degrees of involvement (as he notes in his Modern Religions book). At the very least, he is not a person who gives up easily in the search for "spiritual Truth." :)

It is good to hear that Wilber is being discussed, with some concern, at such gatherings of cult-studies professionals. Conversely, though, I find it discouraging to see that Benjamin is being overtly influenced by Anthony's typology. (In which, by the way, it is hardly the case that "Monistic refers to non-judgmental openness to all people whereas dualistic refers to an Us vs. Them elitist dichotomy." The references there are meant to be theological/metaphysical, not sociological.) He has, after all, read the "Spiritual Choices" chapter in STG, and at least knows of the existence of the core ideas in the "Gurus and Prisoners" chapter. (When we exchanged manuscripts in late 2004, I had not yet fleshed out the latter ideas regarding Zimbardo's prison study; they were only in their final form in the later PDF.)

Benjamin concludes: "Perhaps a significant variable to determine if my Neutral placement of Integral Institute is justified or somewhat naive will be the response (if any) I receive from them based upon the exposure of this article." My own hunch would definitely be "naive," but we shall see.

More significantly, I was intrigued by the application of the "Bonewits Cult Danger Scale" to various groups. And the reason I found that intriguing was because, several minutes after reading Benjamin's article through the first time, it occurred to me: How would Philip Zimbardo's prison study fare, according to that set of criteria? That is, would that simulated prison—in which more than one-third of the student "prisoner" participants were breaking down psychologically within less than a week of their confinement—be viewed as a "safe" or a "dangerous" environment, based on the Bonewits criteria?

The criteria (1 = lowest rating; 10 = highest):

• Internal Control. The guards had essentially total control over the prisoners, so a value of 10.

• Wisdom Claimed: amount of infallibility declared about decisions. Well, there was certainly no way for the prisoners to question or disobey the decisions of the guards without being punished. But punishing people, even harshly, for disobedience to the dictates of the leaders, isn't the same thing as claiming wisdom or infallibility. There were no explicit claims that the decisions of the guards were wiser than that of the prisoners, only that the guards' dictates must be obeyed without dispute. So, unquestionable authority claimed = 10. But, wisdom claimed = 3, at most.

• Wisdom Credited: to leaders by members, amount of trust in the decisions made by leader(s). The two dozen study participants were randomly split (ah, proper experimental protocols! gotta love 'em!) into "guards" and "prisoners." So, it was never about the "wisdom" of the leaders: It was just about deference to authority. Let's be generous, and call this a 5, in associating deference to authority with an implicit ascribing of wisdom to it.

• Dogma: rigidity of reality concepts taught, of amount of doctrinal inflexibility. There was no "doctrine" or particular "view of reality" propounded by the superintendent or guards of the simulated prison. Yet, the prisoners were indeed being taught about what their low "place in the world" was; and, in a real sense, their salvation/parole depended on them going willingly along with that inflexible teaching of subjugation. Notwithstanding that, unlike the terms of religion, they knew from the beginning that it was "all a game," i.e., that their "damnation" or imprisonment in that "hell" was neither real nor eternal. A value of 5, let's say.

• Recruiting: emphasis put on attracting new members, amount of proselytizing. There was actually no additional "recruiting" at all done by Zimbardo after the initial call for subjects. So, a value of 1.

• Front Groups: number of subsidiary groups using different name from the main group. None. Value of 1.

• Wealth: amount of money and/or property desired or obtained, emphasis on members' donations. Prisoners' donations? None. Value of 1.

• Political Power: amount of external political influence desired or obtained. By the superintendent and guards? None. (One of the prisoners, though, had planned, going into the study, to expose and publicize what he wrongly took the "establishment" experiment to be.) Value of 1.

• Sexual Manipulation: of members by leaders(s), amount of control over the lives of members. Well, you're not supposed to be having sex with your fellow inmates in a (simulated) prison. But that's hardly an unreasonable "sexual manipulation": It's not that "you shouldn't have sex because God doesn't want you to," or that "you should have sex with me (the leader) because God wants you to." Call it a 3.

• Censorship: amount of control over members' access to outside opinion on group, its doctrines or leader(s). Prisoners could only meet with their families on designated visitors' days. Thus, there was extreme control over that access. Yet, the access was still given on a regular basis, in scheduled hours, as opposed to not being allowed at all (e.g., in the geographically isolated Jonestown). And, they were allowed additional visits from a priest. Say a 7.

• Dropout Control: intensity of efforts directed at preventing or returning dropouts. If this had been a real prison, the value would clearly be 10: you cannot be allowed to (literally) escape/leave. But it was only a simulated prison, where both the guards and the prisoners knew, going in, that they could "walk out any time." (Of course, the prison management "thought of luring #8612 back on some pretext and then imprisoning him again because he was released on false pretenses." But, they never actually acted on that, so the other prisoners couldn't have known of the possibility.) So, a value of 1: You could indeed leave, simply forfeiting your pay for participating in the study, with no other objective negative repercussions for doing so.

• Endorsement Of Violence: when used by or for the group or leader(s). There was much sadism exhibited by Zimbardo's guards, particularly when they thought they weren't being watched. But, they were explicitly forbidden from using physical violence (which is surely what this criterion refers to, as opposed to "psychological violence" or manipulation) to keep their "prisoners" in line. Thus, a 2 at most.

• Paranoia: amount of fear concerning real or imagined enemies, perceived power of opponents. "Opponents" of the "simulated prison"? None. Value of 1.

• Grimness: amount of disapproval concerning jokes about the group, its doctrines or leader(s). The "prisoners" certainly could not get away with joking about their guards' or superintendent's behaviors when the guards were listening. Not if they hoped to be "paroled." And, even just amongst themselves, a prisoner who had stood up to the guards, rather than being celebrated, was punished by his fellow prisoners. Call it an 8.

• Surrender Of Will: emphasis on members not having to be responsible for personal decisions. Certainly very high: prisoners are told when to eat, sleep, bathe, etc. Say, a 10.

How does that all look, then?

Benjamin graded the Integral Institute an equal 3.94—more destructive than the "3.73" SRF of my own cult experience. Yet, in the latter environment numerous monastics have been reported to be suicidal, for having given their lives to "God and Guru" in a psychologically abusive (i.e., "ego-killing") environment, with no way out from that "prison" without admitting themselves to be "spiritual failures," disloyal to the Divine Guru:

I want to tell you of the depression and even suicidal tendencies that have been in evidence among some of my monastic brothers and sisters. They find themselves in a position where they can't fulfill their vows of service and obedience to Master, in that monastic setting, without furthering the immense problem at SRF. Many have been there for many years and fear leaving the ashram in lieu of not being able to provide for themselves in today's job market. That is just scratching the surface of the dilemma many find themselves in.

Conversely, even in Zimbardo's relatively "safe" environment, the low-on-the-hierarchy members of that "pretend prison" would endure sadistic abuse rather than risk showing themselves to be "bad prisoners" in simply "disengaging" from that environment. And, close to half of same prisoners were breaking down mentally within less than a week of their confinement.

If you "do not see anything serious enough to be very alarmed about" in an Integral Institute which scores even worse than SRF, with the latter bringing out the "depression and even suicidal tendencies" of its residential members, you are clearly still far less "cynical" than I am about these things.

Not to mention the fact that, if deeply questioning the teachings of the integral leaders in practice automatically makes one "first tier," while "salvation" is only to be had from a "second tier" position, one is obviously going to have no easy time summoning the independence of thought to question the environment enough to even want to disengage from it.

The problem is not so much that checklists like Bonewits' are "notoriously unreliable" for determining which groups are likely to become grossly manipulative, much less physically dangerous. Rather, the bigger issue is that the people applying such criteria regularly underestimate the degree of psychological abuse which goes on in even "Neutral" or "Moderate" groups, where you "can leave any time you want" without the threat of physical violence being used against you for doing so. If you think that the "freedom to disengage" makes such depression- and suicide-inducing "spiritual prisons" safe, or in any way easy to leave, you really need to put much more thought into the subject. You can start with considering how difficult it was for the "prisoners" in Zimbardo's study to leave that environment, and with how even Ken Wilber himself, at the low point of his second marriage, went out gun-shopping, intending to blow his own brains out rather than just walk away from that.

And, if you have had good experiences with the (fiction-based) Neopagan movement, you really need to try even just being politically incorrect around them, and see how much longer your presence is welcomed, there. (I worked for a year at an organic food store in Winnipeg prior to my nine months at SRF's Hidden Valley ashram, surrounded amid the pesticide-free produce by such individuals. Needless to say, I kept my controversial opinions to myself much more, back in that day.)

P.S. As to Wilber purportedly "engag[ing] in highly constructive dialogue early on with his most prominent academic critics, as evidenced in the 1997 book" Ken Wilber In Dialogue: I just happened to be re-reading Andrew Smith's review of Meyerhoff's Bald Ambition a couple of nights ago. From which:

A few years ago, a book honoring Wilber, Ken Wilber in Dialogue, collected the views of many of these critics, allowing Wilber to engage them all. But I found it illuminating that he did not concede a single substantive point to any of these critics, and that he identified a single writer out of them whom he felt completely understood his system—the only writer who made no real criticisms of his system at all.

"I think the accident was kind of God's way of saying, 'Ben, maybe you need to step back a little bit,'" Roethlisberger said Friday before teeing off at a celebrity golf tournament at Lake Tahoe. "Maybe I was taking things for granted a little bit too much. It's almost like you get a feeling of invincibility"....

Roethlisberger estimated he has received hundreds of thousands of cards and letters of support "and I've read every one of them."

"Hundreds of thousands" is at least two hundred thousand. It takes around five seconds to read a card, even if he had someone helping him with the opening. (Sports stars don't open or generally respond to their own fan mail; family members, etc., help out.) So, 5 seconds per card, twelve cards per minute, 720 cards per hour. To get through 200,000 cards would take around 275 hours; at 12 hours per day, that's 23 days.

So, in spite of Ben's elevating of simple coincidence to the status of God taking an interest in his life, his claim of having read every one of "hundreds of thousands" of cards could well be true.

If a "dumb-ass" football player with not a whole lotta education (relatively speaking) can get things like that right, why can't Wilber?

(Yes, kw was kaptain of his junior-high football team. That bears about as much relation to professional athleticism as his written work does to real academia.)

This is interesting:

Then came the "unsolicited testimonials"....

Ken,
I just finished reading [the "Wyatt Earpy" postings] here at school, and am now crying at my desk, heart exploded open, I AM-ness fully awake.......
I received my dharma name yesterday--Sojin, "total integration," the closest we could come to "Integral" in Japanese.....
I love you..i love you...
blessings.
[ ]

Members of the LIC [London Integral Circle], {remember the email from Helen in a later blog post? Helen is from the LIC} tell me that Sojin is the Dharma name of Lynne Feldman, attorney for II, and Vice Chancellor of IU.

Of course, I'm sure Ken had no idea Lynne had told that to LIC. He didn't expect anyone outside II to know who this {unnamed} person is....

How disingenuous is this, to ANONYMOUSLY quote your staff attorney in praise of you, as though people every where were just mailing in their praise.

He's been called the "Einstein of consciousness research" by his own literary agent, and brought his attorney and Vice Chancellor to tears of joy.

It ain't what you know, it's who you know. You know?

Found an issue of the current Skeptic magazine in my mailbox yesterday.

And this was odd because, you know, my subscription ran out quite some time ago.

Looks to be an issue devoted to religion. So, I guess either someone relevant figured I'd appreciate being "cc'd" with that ... or the Skeptic office really needs to invest in better subscription-management software.

If it really is a gift, it would be impolite not to read it ... so I'll have to find the time. (It's been quiet in the O.K. Corral lately. Too quiet. Perhaps "Wyatt" is nursing his self-inflicted wounds.)

Back in my university days, I took out a one-year subscription to Performing Arts in Canada magazine, or some such, which kept paying off for years afterwards. Comparably, the student-discounted opera tickets got me in to see The Magic Flute; though I spent most of the show writing a philosophy essay in my head.

Memories....

P.S. Scientists have recently re-performed something like the Good Friday Experiment. Only this time, "Almost a third of the research participants found the [psilocybin] drug experience frightening even in the very controlled setting."

Good to see that Jeff Meyerhoff has now responded to Ken Wilber's "Wyatt Earpy" (etc.) bloggings:

[I]n most of the rebuttals I cite, [kw] not only does not argue the ideas better than me, he can't even describe the criticisms. And to double the irony, he contends that because I am of a lower altitude the criticisms I make are neither true, nor false, but nonsensical. Yet if, as he says, he's truly way ahead of us critics, and is serious about criticism, why can't he even get the criticisms right? If they are so easy to rebut, why not just state what they are and respond, instead of mangling them into crude, either/or simplifications?

The way I see it, my critique and that of others has left so little of Wilber's integral synthesis standing that he has to devise ways to avoid responding to them in order to fool his followers, and probably himself, into thinking that his system is the best integration of contemporary knowledge available. Wilber's techniques of avoidance are long and getting longer....

My conclusion is that the emperor has few clothes. The cowboy is circling the wagons to better defend an untenable position. He's been exposed and can't confront it nor admit it, and so he avoids critical engagement through an array of diversions.

My conclusions exactly.

TranceNet, formerly the #1 site for debunking Transcendental Meditation®, went offline a while back.

Now, it's been removed from the Wayback Machine, too.

Sexy Sadie, what have you done?

Well, at least Rick Ross's page on the Maharishi is still up. It doesn't have the information on the dangers of meditation, though, or the "Troubled Guru" exposé. Just a few excerpts from that piece to be found now on Google Groups (which are likely to stay there), and Google's incomplete page cache from trancenet.org (which may well vanish as soon as the powers concerned realize that it's still there). And Steve Hassan's links.

I had found two online sources that pointed to "Dr." Jean Houston as the source of the "Einstein of consciousness research" quote with regard to Wilber (#1, #2).

To be sure, Houston played her own role in inflating the hot-air balloon that is the work (and ego) of Ken Wilber, blurbing for The Atman Project that "Wilber will likely do for consciousness what Freud did for psychology." (You mean, screw it up with so many half-baked imaginings mixed in with a few valid insights that it would take decades/generations for the field to recover? If that's what she meant, it was prescient—because that's exactly what kw, like Freud, has done.)

But, the original source of the "Einstein of consciousness research" title was John White. As per the Foreword to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition (1997) of The Spectrum of Consciousness, contributed by White and reproduced in Volume One of Wilber's Collected Works:

Altogether, Wilber's spiritual understanding, creativity, scholarship [!] and literary competence make him, as I said in an early review of his work, the much-needed Einstein of consciousness research. "Much-needed" because since the Psychedelic Sixties, there has been burgeoning interest in higher states of consciousness, noetics and allied subjects.

White was again Wilber's literary agent for The Spectrum of Consciousness; kw actually dedicated the book to him. Thus, he stood to benefit financially in direct proportion to the sales of that book.

That something which began as little more than self-serving P.R. could have since become nearly "accepted wisdom," in no small part through simple consumer gullibility, peer ignorance, and force of repetition from "authorities" and others in the field, is quite astonishing, is it not?

"He's been called the 'Einstein of consciousness research'"? Well, yes. But more accurately, "He's been called the 'Einstein of consciousness research' by his own literary agent."

Doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?

Admit it: You've always wondered where this "Einstein of consciousness" nonsense started, haven't you?

Wilber didn't declare himself the "Einstein of Consciousness Research"—that was Jean Houston in a blurb on one of his earlier books, back in the '80s.

Ah yes, Jean Houston. Non-guru to the White House:

For almost a year and a half, I had served as a kind of intellectual sparring partner for First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, helping her focus ideas for the book she was writing.

A report that the First Lady and I had engaged in an imaginative exercise in which we reflected on what Eleanor Roosevelt might have said about building a better society for our children sent the media scurrying for colorful copy. "Séance!" the front pages of the newspapers shouted. "Witchcraft!" And even that most dreaded of all epithets, "Guru!"

Needless to say, the distortions both embarrassed Mrs. Clinton and played havoc with my life and career. Virtually every newspaper and news magazine in the world carried the stories, the facts hugely distorted, and liberally dosed with snickering asides by reporters who never bothered to find out anything about me or my work.

As a result of this public ridicule, I found my reputation for thirty years of good work in the service of human betterment strained so badly that lectures were canceled by nervous sponsors and research grants were withdrawn. I felt that I had gone overnight from being regarded as a respected pioneer on the frontier of human capacities research to a laughable representative of the flaky fringe....

What was it that turned the evening news into an Inquisition?

I suspect that the answer lies in two great phobias—fear of the rising power of women and fear of the power of imagination and inner realities.

A "laughable representative of the flaky fringe" ... as opposed to being a "respected pioneer" in the field of transpersonal psychology. What is the difference, again?

Autobiographical claims on the part of Houston include supposed childhood friendships with both Albert Einstein and Teilhard de Chardin, and a status as Margaret Mead's adopted daughter. (Mead also served as the President of the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Mind Research.) That, in addition to being a descendent of Sam Houston, the founder of the southeast Texas city. She has further asserted that "the inspiration for her primary teaching method" was gotten from ventriloquist Edgar Bergan and dummy Charlie McCarthy, when she was eight years old.

Thankfully, Seńor Wences played less of a role in the shaping of her philosophy.

"S'OK?"

"S'awright."

As Advisor to UNICEF in human and cultural development [!!!], she has worked to implement some of their extensive educational and health programs, primarily in Myanmar [Burma] and Bangladesh.

Houston's own teachings have included the following wisdom:

I have been known to begin seminars by asking people to tell each other three outrageous lies! The resistance that some people experience to such a suggestion may be indicative of the extremely literal mind-set that results from an acculturation that worships "the fact" and logical proof.

Yes, if there is one thing of which the world needs more, it is the ability to tell others (and yourself) outrageous lies. But what do you expect, with a cultural conditioning which teaches us to "worship" those pesky "facts"?

In more recent years, Houston has endorsed the writing of one Tanis Helliwell, saying that "Tanis is a spiritual evocateur and deep seer who opens us up to other voices ... other realms."

The book for which she was blurbing? Summer with the Leprechauns. Published by Blue Dolphin—purveyors of my own first book. Groan.

It all fits, though: If you think that leprechauns are real, believing that Ken Wilber is an "Einstein" should be easy by comparison.

Houston's husband, Robert Masters, by his own "About the Author" testimony, is a "leading pioneer of modern consciousness research," "one of the founders of the Human Potentials Movement" ... and former director of the Library of Sex Research. ("Ssssh! If you can't do your research quietly, you'll have to leave! Some of us are trying to read!!") Much of his "Work" (always capitalized) in the non-library regard has centered around Sekhmet, an Egyptian goddess possessing the head of a lioness and the body of a woman—ostensible a "Gateway to alien realms" of consciousness via the raising of the kundalini energy. The worldview within which Masters' Egyptian metaphysics functions includes the following ideas (from The Goddess Sekhmet, p. 9):

The "Gods" of Chaos ordinarily "ascend" only to the realm of the KHU [the "fourth most subtle of the Five Bodies," cf. auras], when a "black magic" is practiced. However, some of the most potent sometimes invade the SÂHU [the "highest" of the Five Bodies] so that even the holiest of men or women is not secure from them. Also, the most powerful of black magicians can work with Metaeidolons representing the Ur-Gods of Chaos at this level, thus effecting the most potent evil.

Later in the same book, Masters expounds further on his view of reality:

You can learn to extract from another body a (cf. astral) Double of that body and interact with it. In fact, this is what, at the lowest level of psychic development, a psychic does, whether for healing, for defense against psychic attack, or in an unscrupulous way to attack by psychic means.

And then this (Ibid., p. 207):

[W]e might talk ... about those experiments where animals who have learned a maze can be killed with their brains fed to other animals who never learned the maze. [Citation? Anyone?] By eating the brain of the animal who learned it, the fed animal learns to go through the maze without any other kind of training....

We might want to talk about the experiments of a man called Rupert Sheldrake, who is in a sense repeating the experiments done long ago by Rudolph Steiner.

And as if that weren't enough (Ibid., p. viii):

Margaret Mead ... developed her own strong affinity for Sekhmet.

Heh. Wilber, in The Holographic Paradigm and Other Paradoxes:

[Physicist John Wheeler] has asked, and Admiral Hyman G. Rickover has joined him, to have all sanctions of the American Association for the Advancement of Science removed from any endeavor tending toward transpersonalism, a sanction that Margaret Mead, ten years ago, fought so hard to obtain.

With good reason, one might add. You go, Hymie!

But what about the ex-Beatles? Where do they stand on all this?

I have read three important and revolutionary books in the last three years: Yoko Ono's Grapefruit, Arthur Janov's Primal Scream, and now Mind Games. I suggest you read and experience them.

—John Lennon, blurbing for Masters and Houston's (1972) Mind Games

The book itself is simply a series of exercises, done in groups, for entering altered states of consciousness. It does, however, aim for the creation of a "Group Spirit" by "a version of a method known and practiced for thousands of years in Tibet, where such entities are known as thought-forms, or tulpas."

Interestingly, both Arthur Young and Dean Radin (by Larry Dossey) have since been called the "Einstein of consciousness research." (A plethora of AE's.) None of those clowns even remotely merit that distinction, of course.

Recipe for success: Get an unduly respected friend to refer to you as an "Einstein." Do that in a field where even the leading lights can't tell shit from Shinola, and are all the more celebrated for believing more than six impossible things/tulpas before breakfast every morning. Soon, you'll find the absurd fiction being quoted all over the place. Then just wait for the "burdens of fame" (and royalty cheques) to roll in.

From Wilber's Enlightenment.Com interview:

E.com: "Why you?" Comparisons to Hegel, the "Einstein of Consciousness"—even if they are only half [??!] right, how do you feel about the fact that you are the world's most influential and popular psycho-spiritual theorist? How's it feel to have so many people reading and absorbing your words? Is it heady? Do you just think of yourself kind of like as a normal guy with a dog that snores or do you ... is it hard not to get inflated?

KW: Yes. It's one of those things ... I tend not to think about it. It's like people who have an overnight success. It's one thing if you're like a rock band, and you're together for a week and then you have a hit single, and then on the next day you're the cover of Time magazine or something. That must be very unbalancing. But most of the bands, like the Beatles or something, they were out there ten years, day in and day out.

And so, I wrote my first book when I was 23. And I went through a period of, kind of inflation and unbalance, because so many projections are put on you that you are both demonic—I'm much more [sic] demonic than some people would think I am—and also there are positive projections going on. And what tends to happen is that some way, sooner or later, you really have to address that. And I don't think I was a particularly fast learner in that regard. But I've had such a long time—I've had thirty years, basically. So even somebody who is kind of slow, like me, in that area, I'm pretty OK....

"Pretty OK"? In terms of "inflation and unbalance"? You think so? Care to get a second opinion on that? Especially with the "demonic" paranoia?

The first [thing] that I've found is that if I just look at the people that respond to my work versus those that don't, there's a general pattern. The people who respond to my work are those that have read just about as much as I have. They know what's out there, and they're very familiar with a large number of the things that I'm bringing together. And so they realize the importance of including all of these various types of approaches and systems and ideas, and trying to bring them under one umbrella.

Heh. But what happens when you are not merely superficially-read across a large number of fields but actually go back to Wilber's original sources, to verify the support which he claims from them? (When he gave the E.com interview, no one had yet done that, in print.) Well, you consistently find that he has, provably, quite unconscionably misrepresented those same fields in order to make them "fit" with what he wants the "truth" to be. Without that brutal misrepresentation of the facts, though, he could never have (falsely) "integrated" all of the fields of knowledge which he pretends to have covered.

Anyway, Wilber's first literary agent, John White, is also, by his own testimony, one of the deeply "enlightened" (read: delusional) ones gracing this Earth:

My exceptional human experience (EHE) is the experience of God-realization.... I entered that [sahaj samadhi] state permanently in 1979.

You've heard of the inmates running the asylum? That's how transpersonal psychology got started, even before kw had begun his own "work" there. And without transpersonal psychology, there would be no (Wilberian) integral studies.

And yes, even though Houston may have started that particular "Einstein of consciousness" nonsense, with White cashing in on an agent's share of the royalties, kw does assuredly "promote himself" using exactly that title: He otherwise needn't have self-servingly repeated that same blurb from his late wife's diaries, in Grace and Grit—he could easily have excised that sentence if he had wanted to. There's a reason why it's in there, "folks."

[P]erhaps it is the ironic fate of those striving toward universality and integration, to end up being the most marginal & idiosyncratic cranks.

The real Einstein was of course a rare exception to that; Wilber himself, however, only proves the rule.

From my Norman Einstein chapter in STG:

Do you imagine, then, that [Wilber] would behave any more nobly toward his contemporary peers ... were they to equally threaten his high place in the integral world...? Or would he more likely misrepresent their work as unapologetically and insultingly as he has done of Bohm's, thereby "nudging them out of the picture"? And what friends might then stand by his side to claim, even years after the fact, that he had committed no such misrepresentation, even when the incontrovertible facts say exactly the opposite?

You've seen how the Great Bald Whale recently turned against Frank Visser? And how he's treated Meyerhoff's work as being unworthy of comment, when it's actually far superior to his own, by any scholarly evaluation? And how kw's hopeless integral friends can't get enough of that and of his "love," being convinced that in standing with him through that descent into a full-blown cult they are on the side of "integral truth"?

Included among those unduly vocal fans is, of course, the academically vacant Stuart Davis, and various anonymous cowards who serve as mouthpieces for what kw would surely like to publicly say to his critics himself, but cannot. After all, coming out and calling us "green shits" or the like himself would blow his "scholarly" cover; so that honor must instead fall to the minions.

But really, anyone who can manage nothing more impressive than to parrot the notion, originating with kw himself, that critics of Wilberian "philosophy" unload on The Shiny One and his unsupportable ideas only for their (critics) being at a "green" value-meme level, may well have an opinion; but it's an opinion that's worth nothing at all outside of that increasingly listing Ship of Integral Fools, departing twice daily from landlocked Boulder.

You've heard that Keith Richards is slated to have a cameo role in the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie? Take note, Stewey: Keith Richards, a real rock star who, if he ever used the phrase "green shits," wasn't merely parroting Wilber's brutal pop-psychologizing and bungling, novice-level (mis)understanding, of Spiral Dynamics®.

All of that behavior is, of course, so very predictable, as the quote from STG above shows. Like shootin' integral fish in a barrel ... if you'll pardon the "Earpy" connotations.

Subject: Tabloid vs. Integral Journalism

July 4, 2006

Frank Visser has posted his "Final Comments to Wilber's Recent Blog Postings," with which I agree strongly throughout:

[T]he people contributing to this website (and whose essays can be found in the Reading Room) are continuously perceived by Wilber as "Wilber wannabees," who "take a shot at him," whereas I see them as decent people who take the time to reflect deeply on integral topics, and come up with whatever confirmations, counter examples, objections and alternatives they can think of. This is regular practice in the world of science and philosophy. It's nothing to be suspicious of!

Really, in what field of actual scholarship could one react to cogent criticisms by saying that the critics involved were just "resentful" of one's success as a leader in the field, and still be taken seriously after that? Einstein's theories, for one, were subjected to plenty of criticism. Can you imagine him ever hiding behind the idea that others were merely resentful or envious of his achievements and recognition, without responding to the meat of their objections?!

But then, unlike Wilber's integral imaginings, Albert's ideas stood on their own (to put it mildly) and meshed with the cold, hard facts. It's only when your ideas "can't explain shit" that you need to denigrate others who criticize them (in whatever "tone," be it respectful or nasty), rather than responding to the valid finding of flaws, misrepresentations, logical inconsistencies and outright fatal shortcomings.

And yes, approaching any out-of-the-ordinary claims—particularly transpersonal ones, and especially any wild-ass "facts" presented by the "Pinocchio of consciousness research," Ken Wilber—from a "sceptically informed" perspective, is long overdue.

From Tony Schwartz's (1996) What Really Matters, regarding Walter Pahnke's classic 1962 "Good Friday Experiment":

[Pahnke] planned to gather twenty divinity students.... Half of them would be given psilocybin, and half a placebo....

The study couldn't have come off better. It was quickly apparent which students had been given the drug. They began wandering around the basement singing and chanting.... Later, all the subjects were asked to fill out detailed questionnaires describing their experiences. Pahnke then asked theologians unfamiliar with the study to assess the subjects' responses, using a system for rating mystical experiences that had been developed by several Western religion scholars....

Nine of the ten students who took the drug were judged to have had authentic mystical experiences. Only one of the ten placebo subjects described anything similar.

So far, so good: "magic mushrooms" can induce spiritually-themed experiences. Probably not ontologically real, but hey, whaddya want, anyway? You're having fun, right?

Erm, but about the "positive results" of that Good Friday Thingy:

[One subject, L.R.] remained so agitated that Pahnke injected him with the antipsychotic drug thorazine. Long after the session, L.R. continued to have anxiety attacks.

In other words, the Good Friday experiment showed that an entheogen can induce mystical experiences with lasting positive effects in subjects who are already religiously inclined and are in a safe, supervised, religious setting. But even under these ideal conditions, an entheogen can also can also trigger extreme anxiety and delusional psychosis....

Rick Doblin could find "no justification" for Pahnke's failure to mention L.R.'s reaction and other negative aspects of the Good Friday experiment.

In L.R.'s case, the delusional psychosis was his belief that he was "God's specially chosen messenger." Presumably that qualified as an "authentic mystical experience" as judged by the "rats in white lab coats," i.e., the experimenters (including Huston Smith).

"The study couldn't have come off better"? Yeah, right. (Note: Pahnke was later to become one of the early members of the Board of Editors of The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology.)

And how about the Concord Prison experiment?

Carried out in the early 1960s by Timothy Leary and several Harvard colleagues, the experiment involved thirty-two inmates of the Massachusetts Correctional Institute in Concord who were approaching their release dates. Over a six-week period, each inmate received psilocybin twice and participated in bi-weekly group psychotherapy sessions. Leary and his colleagues claimed that after the inmates were released, their recidivism rate was much lower than that of convicts with similar backgrounds. "We had kept twice as many convicts out on the street as the expected number," Leary wrote in 1968. After examining Leary's notes and prison records, Doblin concluded that the recidivism rate of Leary's subjects was actually slightly higher than that of other convicts.

Can't believe a word from those transpersonal bastards, can you? Even when the mental health and physical safety of others are at stake.

The results of the Rat Park experiment are more believable.

Luther Burbank was famed for introducing between eight hundred and a thousand new plant varieties, over fifty years of effort, including a "spineless" cactus. Yogananda gives one account of Luther's development of that plant:

"The secret of improved plant breeding, apart from scientific knowledge, is love." Luther Burbank uttered this wisdom as I walked beside him in his Santa Rosa garden. We halted near a bed of edible cacti.

"While I was conducting experiments to make 'spineless' cacti," he continued, "I often talked to the plants to create a vibration of love. 'You have nothing to fear,' I would tell them. 'You don't need your defensive thorns. I will protect you.' Gradually the useful plant of the desert emerged in a thornless variety."

I was charmed at this miracle.

However, from Peter Dreyer's A Gardener Touched with Genius, p. 24:

[Burbank] had assiduously collected varieties of cactus from Mexico, South Africa and other countries until one finally turned up that was without the usual spines on the stalks, and another that lacked spicules on the leaves. These characteristics were combined in a single plant by hybridization after an extensive series of crossings, and a spineless cactus ... was produced. Now and then a spine still occurred on the stems.... Burbank demonstrated the harmlessness of his cactus by softly rubbing his cheek against the pads. It was a remarkable achievement. But it was no miracle.

The irony? I first discovered Dreyer's book in the Hidden Valley (SRF) ashram in Escondido, CA. Hoisted on their own (spineless) petards, as it were.

Music: Katie Melua, Mockingbird Song. "Melua would still sound simply ambrosial singing from a washing machine repair manual."

If you've ever been through a cult-follower experience, you will recognize much familiar stuff in this six-part posting regarding life in Sai Baba's community.

The novelty of finding a new reason for living, a retreat and a refuge, "a spiritual home" and what one believes more and more to be a divine teacher with all conceivable powers and graces, can be sustained for years and only wears off gradually....

It is noteworthy how persons who become ... devotees soon begin to show easy acceptance of authoritarian practices, undemocratic ideas and handed-down social and other superstitions....

Acceptable opinions are prescribed implicitly throughout the movement...

He almost always (and I do mean almost invariably!) speaks in the most sweeping terms and is prone to almost hair-raising over-generalizations about the nature of people, governments, world conditions and on any number of issues. The degree of exaggeration and factual inaccuracy is quite extraordinary for a supposedly intelligent teacher!....

[The] movement relies very heavily on what are known as "group effect" and "groupthink" in its efforts to avert realities and avoid external (or internal) criticism, and reject witnesses and any evidence contrary to its beliefs about facts....

"Group effect" is an experimentally-proven source of wrong decision-making in a group due to the tendency and desire to conform. What others in a group think quite easily influences persons who have different ideas and perceptions into denying their own conviction....

"Groupthink" results from selectivity of information, avoidance of criticism of the groups' integrative ideas and from not studying enough alternatives. This is accompanied by a false sense of security/being invulnerable, strong belief in the group's ideals and shared stereotypes, suppression of one's feelings and sustaining illusory unanimity such as though defensive rationalizations. Group pressure to conform is involved—whether subtle or blatant, implicit or explicit....

Matters he cannot explain he says are "beyond the human mind".... Thus he avoids facing any difficult questions. The extenuated fabric of truths, half-truths and contradictions is very difficult to penetrate and see for what they are, especially for those who themselves are fully enrolled in the web of deceits. His teachings are so largely "black-or-white," and so sweepingly generalizing and lacking in nuances and depth, whether psychological or philosophical, that they amount to a mostly rigid religious fundamentalism.... Any dispassionate overview of his teaching shows many glaring discrepancies....

Those who pretend to some kind of spiritual and moral leadership tend to talk down to others, lack genuine self-irony[.] Such lack of self-reflection is seen widely in the ... movement when speakers and writers almost only parrot [the leader] and so hide themselves behind his perceived name, fame and power.... He has not asked the forgiveness of anyone for anything, nor is it likely that he has stopped doing wrong things. What Divine Person would ever speak or act like him?

Well, at least it's not the "refuge" of II, inculcating a daftly superstitious belief in Q-Link pendants, alongside philosophical explanations that are ostensibly "beyond the first-tier human mind"....

Oh, and Happy Canada Day! Hope they don't have the fireworks too loud tonight: Some of us are trynna work! (Preparing two website quotes, answering questions from an email interview, and reading other technical documentation for the Tuesday following the long weekend. Sigh. "No rest for the wicked," eh?)

Of course, since it's a "programming weekend," you know what that means: I get to eat all the nachos I want, and to quench my thirst with my choice of vodka and Coke, or jinnyn tonyx! The first v+C and half a box of jalapeno poppers, though, have already given me the worst stomach ache I've had in years, so I dunno....

P.S. Regarding Wilber and Anthony's "eight boxes," used for attempted predictions as to which groups are most likely to degenerate into destructive environments: It is well-known that destructive cults also form around political and psychological leaders. In those cases, the "important" dichotomies of monistic v