Well, "first off," you don't need to "trust" me on anything. You may unfortunately need to
(mistakenly) trust Ken Wilber
to accurately represent other people's ideas, in spite of his documented penchant for brutally twisting those,
without proper references or direct quotations, to suit his own half-baked, unsupportable view of reality.
But because I've so extensively referenced everything in STG, even with links to internal
pages on amazon.com, you don't need to "trust" me on anything. D'uh.
In all seriousness, I could be the biggest and most untrustworthy "asshole" in the world
(taking over Wilber's long-time holding of that position, one assumes), and it would
hardly affect the validity of STG, given its plethora of direct quotes and online references.
Wilber's the one who (seriously) "can't be trusted" to get the simplest thing right, not me.
STG proves that "on every page" where Wilber's consistently foolish notions and bullshitting opinions
come up. And those proofs, of course, could only make
children who want to believe in the "Wilber Claus" (and Cohen Claus, etc.) feel very, very
uncomfortable, to the point of not being able to think the least bit clearly (if they ever were
able to in the first place, which is unlikely).
Talk about denial. This guy's soaking in it. But then, there are always those who would rather be misled
by their respected authorities, and fed what they simply want to hear, than told the unpleasant truth
by someone who doesn't bow before the same unworthy heroes.
Oh, and then there's this, too:
Falk's interspersed rhetoric and ad hominem attacks leave a lot to be desired and I
would surprised if anyone will take away those grains [of truth in STG] given his tone....
For someone who is so quick to point out Wilber's "lack of high school knowledge," I wonder if Falk himself
paid very much attention in his English or Writing 101 classes in the past. I mean, go ahead and
criticize away but do so with some skills besides referring to Ken’s second wife as "stacked," and
saying, "I myself am (thankfully) no part of the Integral Naked 'intellectual circle jerk'
community—led by the 'Pee-Wee Herman of consciousness studies.'
[You're missing a closing quotation mark here, Mr. Nabokov.]
What are we back in high school?
So if you can look past the pop psych analyses and out of context quotes check it out sometime
and see what you think...
Before taking Dashh's attempted critique of my writing
style too seriously, consider his own ... er, "talented" ... attempts at
poetry and
prose. (And I'm the one who didn't pay attention in high school?
"Slowly year after year/It all starts to clear"? To which one is tempted to add:
"Tiddley-pom, tiddley-pom." At least I've learned to write
since high school, even with having been through years of
best-in-class engineering, physics, and computer programming. Not everyone can say that.)
With all that, plus the man's egregious errors in punctuation
(should be "out-of-context quotes," Wilber's "lack of high-school knowledge,"
and "What are we, back in high school?"), well, "consider the source." (There are around 90 typeset
pages of thorough criticisms of kw in STG; they go well beyond the "skills" which Dashh has
grudgingly credited me with, above.)
And carping at me for "ad hominem attacks," and for my "tone"? Cry me a river and give me a break!
I was just tryna keep up with kw's own "dirty talk"! (I can't touch him in terms of
misrepresentations of high-school-level ideas, though, or in unprovoked nastiness, such as he
ineptly heaped on David Bohm.)
Likewise, it was Wilber's own second wife who was expounding on the size of her
rack, in Grace and Grit: "They're big breasts, have been ever since I was about twelve."
Plus, from Boomeritis, with the "Ken Wilber" character speaking:
"She was my age, maybe a year or two older. More important, she had really big breasts, which is one
of the few things I might actually miss in cyberheaven. Virtual boobs just didn't quite seem to make it."
So don't blame me.
Really, it was only because of kw's own reported adolescent behaviors (public miming of masturbation, asking
for blow jobs, etc.) that I started throwing that same "high school" stuff back at him.
Also note: Other opinionated lovers of Wilber and Da
have previously regarded me as being "puritanical" for having written STG at all.
And now, this "integral expert" doesn't like me using the word "stacked." Can't win, then, can I?
Further, in Dashh's opinion, my "Norman Einstein" chapter title, referring to Wilber,
was a "tactless slap" at kw. Yet, he's titled his own piece about me, as "What the Falk?"
Well, Dashh, don't complain at me for allegedly being "tactless" in that regard,
if you're going to then turn right around and do exactly the same thing!
If I'm "tactless" (which I'm not), it's only logical to say that you're
tactless, hypocritical ... and unoriginal.
Dashh's own criticisms of Wilber, by his own testimony, have always been made
"with an underlying respect and compassion."
Well, whatever. The applications for sainthood are that way.
You don't get points in life for bowing respectfully before people who've grossly and
dishonestly misrepresented others' ideas to get you to respect them in the first place,
as kw has routinely done throughout his life's work.
Maybe you enjoy being misled by intellectually dishonest and untrustworthy people whom you
foolishly continue to admire, Dashh, even after all of their deceptions and incompetence have
been thoroughly documented. I don't, even if pathological fabricators and exaggerators are
what the little integral world is made of.
And, which quotes were supposedly taken out of context by me, to change their meaning? Where??
Nowhere. But, like Wilber himself, such willing followers as these
are consistently satisfied with simply stating things like that authoritatively,
without so much as a single reference, expecting it to just be swallowed whole, as is the wont of
their "integral religion" and its lemming members. (Ah, and the "Pee-Wee Herman" line was following
another critic's regarding of Wilber's Integral Naked website as consisting of "a bunch of poseurs at an
intellectual masturbation party." So, with that relevant relationship,
it's Dashh who's taking that out of context, in trying to make me look bad. Hypocrisy, Part II.)
I've seen the same pure nonsense directed at David Lane's devastating critique of Wilber, from 1996, i.e,
where utterly baseless accusations that Lane had failed to understand much of Wilber's position
were presented without so much as a hint as to what they ostensibly referred to. 'Tis the
wilber-esque way: If you can't substantiate your own case, just try to bullshit your way through,
and hope that nobody asks any questions. Kenny-boy's made a career out of that.
And, "pop psych analyses" of kw? Only if Wilber's own criticisms of others as trying to "nudge him out"
of various fields and discussions, or his admissions of needing to be "loved by everyone,"
etc., are equally "pop." (Considering that The Bald One has long been regarded as the
"foremost theoretician in transpersonal and integral psychology," I'm guessing that they aren't.
Dashh's own field of professional expertise, surprisingly, is neither in psychology nor creative writing,
but rather in ... accounting. LOL. So that, plus some psychotherapy and reading a few of kw's grossly
overrated books, has made him an expert on spotting pop psychology! LOL, again. What a joke.)
Pop psychology doesn't come from reasonably tracing the motivations behind a person's actions
in common-sense terms (as opposed to Oedipal complexes, etc.),
particularly when that is done with reference, here, to kw's own admitted shortcomings.
Rather, it arises
when people reduce complex sets of influences and outcomes to a few simple categories—you
know, like kw does in his bastardized version of
Spiral Dynamics.
(Even something like a "non-pop" Oedipal complex derives from simple patterns, learned in youth, and then
repeated throughout one's life, via one's arrested psychological development. That is, the psychological
dynamics and repeated patterns which people like Dashh denigrate as being "pop psych,"
are exactly what underlie "real" psychology, too. D'uh! Even Wilber's own books, bereft as they
generally are of anything resembling a deep understanding of human motivations, teach that absolutely
standard principle! How could anyone miss it?!!)
I knew I'd get wrongly accused of doing pop psych eventually; I just figured it'd hold off until
until I had finished, or at least started, my character biography of Albert Einstein. That is, of the
real Einstein, not some doofus "cultic hero" New Age pretender whose defenders include
at least one foolish accountant who wrongly thinks that (a) he can write at beyond a high-school level, and
(b) he's in a position to give unsolicited advice to people who can write, as to how
they should improve their art, to be more like he'd (hypocritically) do it! Brilliant!
Interestingly, highly placed experts (who can actually spell and punctuate)
in the non-bastardized version of Spiral Dynamics have had this to say about my critique of
Wilber:
Thank you for forwarding a copy of your manuscript for our review....
You are an excellent writer [aw, shucks....] and have done a tremendous
amount of research. Your pacing and flow is interesting and engaging. I respect your use of quotes and
sources, and I also appreciate the work, courage, and leap you've taken to commit yourself to undertake
such a task with the attention to detail that many would overlook....
Unfortunately, the tides of fanaticism [around Wilber, e.g., in the Integral Institute] are stronger
at this point than the tides of reason, and you rightly expose what is being done [there].
Those evaluations, like Len Oakes' endorsement of STG, come from real psychologists, i.e., from
people who actually are in a position to distinguish properly detailed psychological analyses from
superficial, "pop" ones. And guess what? The pretend-expert Dashh is the only bloke I know of who's
ever openly imagined my analyses to be the latter, rather than the former. Real, top-flight
professional psychologists know better. They can tell the difference.
So, as kw would say: "Deal with it." Or at least friggin' learn to pay attention to detail.
Until these unduly opinionated bloggers can manage that much, as toddling first steps,
there is absolutely no hope of them being able to
distinguish competence from incompetence in other people's work—or in their own. (Anyone who picks up
only "several good points and grains of truth"
from the Norman Einstein chapter in STG has
gargantuan amounts of improvement to make in that regard. "No soup for you, Integral-Boy!!")
And until that far-off day, they'll continue to daftly think that Wilber is the
"cat's ass of spirituality," in spite of his rampant intellectual dishonesty,
and his equally inexcuseable and widespread inability to get even high-school-level ideas right,
as is thoroughly documented in STG.
I remind all of Wilber's easily offended admirers, in their collective delusion that kw and his
largely misled, mistake-filled life's work are worthy of R-E-S-P-E-C-T:
Both Huston Smith (deeply admired by Dashh
himself)
and James Fadiman
endorsed my own (credulous, disowned)
first book
with far more enthusiasm than they ever gave to Wilber's
early work. (Both Smith and Fadiman are members of the Board of Editors of the refereed
Journal of Transpersonal Psychology,
as is the publisher of that first book, Paul Clemens ...
who thinks that leprechauns are real, oy vey.)
Why do you think that is? That even with no formal training whatsoever on my part,
my ideas have been endorsed by two of the top three people in that refereed, "scholarly" field?
(Hint: It's because I can run circles around even the best of the
"theorists" in transpersonal psychology and integral studies, even on their own turf.
It's just that, unlike Wilber and his bullshitting ilk, I am by now painfully aware of how unsound the data
on which they're basing their theorizings is. If there does turn out to be any validity
to higher levels of reality and states of consciousness, though, that first book of mine explains more
about them than Wilber's entire life's work does, or ever will do. Seriously.)
I would further remind the same Wilber-admiring individuals that my analysis of
Wilber vs. Bohm has been
praised as being "brilliant and deeply insightful," by a prof who's in an excellent position to know.
So: Ken Wilber is my "superior" in "every way"? LAUGHING. OUT. LOUD.
Bugs Bunny on Ken Wilber? Here.
None of the deeply narcissistic "spiritual" figures covered in STG,
from the nasty, bumbling kw on down, are "superior" to any minimally decent, honest, caring human
being. Rather, they're all just predominantly deluded bullshit artists who cannot distinguish between
reality and their own fantasies, and who have managed to fool
themselves, and some number of gullible followers, into thinking that they're "enlightened beings."
Were those "great sages" capable of being properly honest with themselves, the world would be a
much different, and much better, place.
Take Ken Wilber and his integral buddies seriously if you wish.
But you're wasting your life on a set of deluded "Santa Claus" beliefs, purveyed by a textbook
"narcissistic cultic hero," who will treat you kindly only so long as you bow sufficiently deeply
before himself and his crumbling, unstable "intellectual edifice." And anyone who should see things clearly
enough to speak out forcefully against such damned foolishness can, of course, then only be an
"untrustworthy asshole." ("Facing the Truth no matter what the consequences"? Oh, please. They
rather run away from it!)
How do cults get started, again? Oh, yeah....
"Won't someone think of (sodomizing) the children?" And then closing ranks and covering it up afterward?
Of course, if they legalize polygamy, you know what that means: We'll be overrun by ... Mormons!!!
I already keep bumping into them on the bus these days. <shiver>
I actually had an uncle (Abe) who converted to Mormonism. Used to sneak across the border with mounds of
covert fruit salad every Sunday, to his group in Washington state. "Black sheep" of the
Christian family, 'e was.
I wouldn't want to be stuck with his soul when Judgment Day rolls around, and only the real
Christians get into heaven!
Still, any religion whose holy book was dictated by a white salamander on a rock to their
hallucinating and plagiarizing founder can't be all bad, eh?
For some reason which I can't recall, months ago I had put a library hold on the
"Billboard Top Hits of 1978" CD. Picked it up today.
