Blog — June, 2007

From Lorin Roche's Guru as God? page:

Imagine that you have been raised to believe you are God. You were born into a little village in India and your mother had a dream when you were in the womb, that a cow jumped over the moon. A wandering naked sadhu walked by, stoned out of his mind, and interpreted the dream as meaning that the child is the Lord of the Universe. More importantly, the sadhu said, some day this child will send millions of rupees back to the village. The village loaded the sadhu up with as much ganga and mangoes as he could carry and sent him on his way before he changed his mind.

The entire village of 80 people, none of whom can read or have ever heard of the United States, and who believe that the jets flying overheard are gods, sign on to this enterprise. You the child are raised to believe he is Lord of the Universe. They put you on a throne and worship you once a week, offering rice, coconuts and beetel leaf and praising you as the Incarnation....

If you saw the brilliant Borat film back over the winter, you will surely remember the scene involving the trio of stereotypical-but-eerily-real feminists.

If not, have fun watching it now.

As the old joke goes:

Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A (high voice): That's not funny!

What's also not funny is Charlene Spretnak's anthology, The Politics of Women's Spirituality—a book which fails every possible "parity [of argument] test," and yet is still presented as being "part of the solution" to the inequalities in the world. Spretnak not only co-authored another book with Fritjof Capra, but also happens to teach at the CIIS—you know, the place which Wilber regarded as being a "cesspool," though for quite different reasons.

If you're wondering what the I.T. industry and the alleged chronic shortage of qualified programmers in North America is really about, this is the classic study: Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage. From which:

[S]ince software technology will continue to change extremely rapidly, and since employers are not willing to hire a veteran programmer who learns a new software skill via coursework, it will always be the case that most programmers do not possess the latest software skills, and thus there always will be a "shortage" [of programmers].

Little if anything has changed in the half-decade since that was written.

When I got laid off by Advantex back in mid-2003, the guy who took my place (presumably for a lower wage, and certainly for having much shorter hair) was an immigrant, here on a temporary work visa. From England, white as the driven snow, having relocated here because Canada (according to our government, at least) "needed his skills."

Blimey. But work visas for I.T., in both the U.S. and Canada, are just there to drive wages down, independent of whether the people coming over are from Manchester, Calcutta or Beijing.

And no, the individuals coming over to work here are not the "best and the brightest" in their fields. Indeed, if they were I would do nothing but welcome them, since I personally believe that anyone in the top 20% of his or her profession should be able to work wherever he/she wants in the world, independent of the local unemployment rates. (As one application of the 80/20 rule, the top 20% of the workers in any field do 80% of the work; that has been verified across a wide range of disciplines.)

From David Berreby's (2005) Us And Them (p. 108-9):

Sir Frederic Charles Bartlett ... studied memory with a simple experimental procedure. He would ask his students to read a folktale, wait a few hours or a few days, and then retell it.

He was careful to select a story that they had never heard before. (It came from anthropological accounts of the Kathlamet people of Oregon.) As you might expect, the student versions left out many details. When they did recall something, they often changed it to make it more familiar. (For instance, they made "peanut" into the more British "acorn" and described paddle-wielding warriors as "rowing" their canoe, the way proper English undergraduates would handle a scull.) The students also added details that weren't in the original. Where the story read "That Indian has been hit," some recalled an Indian being killed, others an Indian being hit by an arrow. Recalling a warrior in the tale who says he will not go into combat because his relatives don't know where he is, "but you may go," many of Bartlett's volunteers added an explanation, like "you have no one to expect you," or "you have no parents."

The students were unaware that some of their "memories" were actually alterations or additions. They imagined they were simply recalling what they had read. It felt so right that they did not see where the story stopped and their own contribution began.

Bartlett decided the students were confident about their memories because they came to the story with a ready-made mental map. When they read about Indian warriors, they thought of arrows....

Once the students had seen enough detail to call up the relevant map, a pattern seemed to complete itself in their minds, and they felt no difference between what they had learned from the outside world and what they had supplied.

Exercise for the reader: Apply that firmly established psychological principle to the integral/AQAL fairy tales told by Ken Wilber. And then wonder no longer at how he can add, delete and modify "facts" at will, always in accord with his "ready-made mental maps," while simultaneously proudly touting his "idiot savant" method of not taking notes from the books he reads, in his "research." All the while "feeling no difference" between objective facts, and the fabrications which he presents as being "real."

It's still academic incompetence and/or dishonesty, though, however explicable it may be. By now, the man has been caught repeatedly misrepresenting others' perspectives to suit what he would like them to be. But rather than admit, in basic academic honesty, to those misrepresentations and logical inconsistencies in his ideas, and adjust his "theories" accordingly, he has instead simply done everything in his power to discredit his critics, through personal attacks rather than reasoned argument.

From Wilber's Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, first published in 1995:

In working with broad orienting generalizations, the [Kosmos] trilogy delivers up a broad orienting map of the place of men and women in relation to the Universe, Life, and Spirit, the details of which we can fill in as we like, but the broad outlines of which really have an awful lot of supporting evidence, culled from the orienting generalizations, simple but sturdy, from the various branches of human knowledge....

It is now time to look at the emergence of the noosphere....

Jantsch points out that these three systems [regulating development, autonomy, and the nervous system] emerge holarchically, and he then proceeds to give a holarchical breakdown of neural structures themselves, based primarily on Paul MacLean's highly influential notion of the triune brain. In MacLean's own words....

In evolution one first sees the emancipation from the ancestral [inflexibility] with the appearance of the lower mammalian brain, which Nature builds on top of the reptilian brain.... Investigations of the last twenty years have shown that the lower mammalian brain plays a fundamental role in emotional behavior. It has a greater capacity than the reptilian brain for learning new approaches and solutions to problems on the basis of immediate experience. But like the reptilian brain, it does not have the ability to put its feelings into words.

MacLean is very specific about the holarchical nature of these three brains:

In its evolution, the brain of [humans] retains the hierarchical organization of the three basic types which can be conveniently labelled as reptilian, paleo-mammalian and neo-mammalian. [The brain stem represents the reptile brain, inherited from reptilian ancestors.] The limbic system represents the paleo-mammalian brain, which is an inheritance from lower mammals. Man's limbic system is much more highly structured than that of lower mammals, but its basis organization, chemistry, etc., are very similar. The same may be said of the other two basic types. And there is ample evidence that all three types have their own special subjective, cognitive (problem-solving) memory and other parallel functions.

In other words, each of the brains is a relatively autonomous holon. And because each is a holon, we cannot say that any specific function is simply located in one of the holons; they all mutually act and interact with upward and downward influence....

[I]nteriors (UL) are correlated, we saw, with specific exteriors (UR), so that emotions "go with" limbic systems and concepts "go with" the neocortex of complex triune brains, and so forth....

Note further how Wilber has the (UR) "reptilian brain stem," "limbic system," and "neocortex" specifically "correlated with" impulse, emotion, and symbols, in his AQAL map.

However, from David Berreby's (2005) Us And Them (p. 143-5), we learn:

According to the "triune" model, the human brain had a "reptilian" section, not much changed in form from when it first evolved, before mammals existed. On top of that were supposed to be regions, highly developed in mammals, where strong emotions and drives were forged. Layered above that, in turn, was the supposedly uniquely human part—the "new cortex," so called because it had recently evolved in our species, unlike the old cortex structures that we share with cats, rats, bats, and other mammals....

[T]he model seemed confirmed in the 1990s by new [fMRI and PET] techniques for imaging the brain....

Recently, though, many researchers have decided that ... there is no sharp division between brain regions of feeling and thought, virtue and vice, soul and animal. Instead, the work of the last decade [i.e., since 1995] portrays a brain in which all these aspects of the self are commingled.

So nowadays you're a little less likely to read that emotions live in the limbic system—a set of structures involving parts of the neocortex and the adjoining inner sides of the two cerebral hemisphere, which the psychiatrist Paul MacLean, who proposed the triune brain theory, had defined in the 1950s as the seat of emotions.

Joseph LeDoux of New York University took a hard look at this concept of a distinct home for emotions in the brain and pointed out its flaws. The first is that the definition of the limbic system has been fuzzy. One of the important temporal-lobe structures for memory is the hippocampus, a curved body inside each lobe, under the cortex. The hippocampus is old cortex, yet [it is] essential for memory, which is a higher-order human faculty, not an emotion.

The second problem with the triune brain concept is that the structures usually identified as part of the limbic system could not be linked to any specific emotion. For example, LeDoux has become well known for his work on the role of the amygdala in fear, but he notes that the frontal cortex is also involved in that emotion. Meanwhile, the amygdala (which is divided into at least twelve regions that don't all do the same thing) is also involved in sexual arousal and other exciting, nonfearful experiences....

[P]eople do have an emotional brain, but it does not consist of a neatly separate emotion sector distinct from regions dedicated to perceiving, acting, or thinking.

It is not clear to me how much of Wilber's statement that "we cannot say that any specific function is simply located in one of the holons" mitigates his use of the triune brain concept. (Did he just mean that emotions affect our reasoning, and vice versa, as crosstalk among dedicated holarchical regions, or was he angling for much more than that?) Regardless, the idea that he was basing that aspect of his holarchy on "simple and sturdy" knowledge is clearly untenable: He was either wrongly taking that interim state of knowledge as being far more sturdy than was warranted, or he was fudging around with the existing (ca. 1995) accepted wisdom and just got lucky that it evolved in the way he wanted it to.

Anyway, at least in this case he wasn't twenty-five years behind the research, as he was (and is) in his ideas regarding animal cannibalism. Sometimes keeping tabs on that man is like watching the tortoise who overtakes the hare, but only in his dreams where he can fly....

So, I was delighted to find that you can actually get note-for-note transcriptions (i.e., guitar tablature, with fretboard animations, even) in electronic format (beyond the ASCII that's long existed on the Internet), at musicnotes.com. They're a bit pricey, but on the bright side you don't end up spending $15 on an entire 80-page book for just one or two songs ... and then having to move bankers boxes full of them when you relocate. (Scanning them would take way too long.)

I don't currently own a printer, so I was annoyed to find, after completing the purchase, that you can only print out the sheet music when you download the files. But it turns out that it works fine to just install something like PDF Creator, and print to that (at least for the "Guitar Guru" tabs, if not for the stupid "Scorch" ones, grrrr).

The Play Guitar Solos DVDs are also good.

I will say it again: Technology is wonderful.

Just discovered The Joel Test.

A recent job I worked at for close to a year scores a 3.5 out of 12.

They had a bug database. Written in Access 97. Same technology as their "flagship" application. (I was interviewed and hired to do VB.NET and Analysis Services 2005. Some day they'll actually get around to doing that. Without me. Good riddance.) Kept a task and release schedule. In Excel. Written spec for new features, but no documentation of the mass of existing code which was (i) truly mickey-mouse from a strictly technical perspective, but nevertheless (ii) absolutely impossible to understand, given that it was implementing business rules which existed nowhere in the world but on the shop-floors of companies in the plastic-bag manufacturing industry. Had testers. An Albanian, and another guy who would beat up the (empty) toilet-paper holder in the bathroom when whoever used the last sheets on the roll neglected to put on a new one. Most disruptive environment I've ever had to try to work in; I had to buy a nice pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones to get anything done at all.

I finally had to get out of there because, aside from being to the point, by the end of that, of not believing a single word the management team told me, you can start to pick up really bad coding habits from working with amateurs who think they're professionals. (Even when they get around to moving their codebase into .NET, the Russian emigre in charge of the I.T. Department is convinced that try/catch blocks can't handle all the fancy stuff they want to do in error handling! You can't buy stupidity like that. Ironically, if you want to learn hacking/cracking, there are many Russian programmers at the top of that field; the total idiot to which I suffered the indignity of having to explain myself just isn't one of them.)

Oh, and there was also that little thing that the owner of that pathetic, spinning-in-circles company-that-thinks-it-can told me, when I mentioned that I still wanted to do some work for a friend of his, which was what I had applied for in the first place: "You work for me now. You do what I tell you to."

Uh-huh. Do I still work for you? Didn't think so.

As of February 2007, space tourist and billionaire software entrepreneur Charles Simonyi—creator of Hungarian notation—is dating Martha Stewart.

Heh, so that's how he got that special meal in outer space: By fuckin' the chef....

HTTPanties. They're W3C-compliant, too.

British rock star Rod Stewart married Penny Lancaster on Saturday in a low-key ceremony on Italy's Ligurian coast. (more)

I guess she wants his body, and she thinks he's sexy.... :)

From Sue Blackmore's Guardian blog:

"Religious faith is not inconsistent with reason."

I nearly choked on my breakfast when I heard this on the Today programme. These words were spoken by Mr Blair, in his inimitably sincere style....

I, for one, do not want to live in a world where religious faith is respected. I do not want more "faith-based initiatives." I do not want more faith schools, and our great universities should continue to teach people to think for themselves, to respect the truth, and to take nothing on faith.

Amen to that.

The Prison Experiment is probably painfully subversive for anyone who cherishes dreams of a grand system and set of spiritual exercises that would supposedly create super-evolved color coded persons who would be impervious to temptation [e.g., in the abuse of power].

Zimbardo's Prison Experiment warns that Ken's hopes of becoming highly evolved, superhuman and invulnerable are a dead end dream, and that his grand project of becoming an invulnerable human being is futile—sad news, indeed. (more)

Andrew Cohen's What Is Enlightenment? magazine has a twelve-page The REAL Evolution Debate article online. From which:

In 1966, Lynn Margulis published a landmark paper in which she argued that millions of years ago, protozoans symbiotically acquired photosynthetic plant cells and that, working together, they eventually developed into an entirely new life form—the eukaryote or multicelled organism. Margulis and her notion of "symbiogenesis" were scoffed at by Neo-Darwinists, who represented the status quo of the scientific community at the time, because evidence of cooperation in biology directly contradicted their theory of the "selfish gene." For twenty years, Margulis fought for her work to gain acceptance, and eventually her tenacity paid off. Today the idea that symbiogenesis is one of the mechanisms of evolution is taught in the majority of high school biology classes.

Wikipedia, on Symbiogenesis:

Dr. Lynn Margulis argued that symbiogenesis is a primary force in evolution. According to her theory, acquisition and accumulation of random mutations are not sufficient to explain how inherited variations occur; rather, new organelles, bodies, organs, and species arise from symbiogenesis. Whereas the classical interpretation of evolution (neo-Darwinism) emphasizes competition as the main force behind evolution, Margulis emphasizes cooperation.

Many ecologists agree, but this idea has little support from other evolutionary biologists. They see little evidence that symbiogenesis has had a major impact on eukaryotic life, or that much of its diversification can be attributed to it. Other than the two examples of mitochondria and chloroplasts, there is no clear evidence of other major traits or transitions that can be attributed to symbiogenesis.

They later quote Phillip Johnson:

The first thing you understand is that the Darwinian theory isn't true. It's falsified by all of the evidence and the logic is terrible. When you realize that, the next question that occurs to you is, well, where might you get the truth?... I start with John 1:1. In the beginning was the word. In the beginning was intelligence, purpose, and wisdom. The Bible had that right. And the materialist scientists are deluding themselves.

Wikipedia, however, on the same Phillip Johnson's work:

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

Ah, but he hasn't read Wilber's books, has he?

More from the WIE piece:

A number of [Theistic Evolutionists], such as Francis Collins, head of the Human Genome Project, are well-established scientists who started out agnostic (at best) but have been overwhelmed by the evidence for design and purpose in the universe.

Wikipedia, on Francis Collins:

Collins has described his parents as "only nominally Christian" and by graduate school he considered himself an atheist. However, dealing with dying patients led him to question his religious views, and he investigated various faiths. He became a believer after observing the faith of his critically ill patients and reading Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis.

Collins is indeed "overwhelmed by the evidence for design and purpose in the universe." But that ain't what caused his conversion from his agnostic days.

The WIE quote from John Cobb led me, via his Wikipedia entry, to the 911 Truth Statement. And there I was more than surprised to find kw's friends Michael Lerner and Saniel Bonder as two of the 100+ people calling for a deeper inquiry into the events of 9/11. (Note: I'm no relation to #30, Richard Falk ... nor to actor Peter, for that matter.) Jim Garrison (#33), too, has appeared on Integral Naked. (Number 43, Richie Havens, opened Woodstock in 1969; #44, Paul Hawken, was heavily involved with both Findhorn and the San Francisco Zen Center.)

How is it that such people can, by 2004, have developed deep suspicions about what their untrustworthy government has fed them on a most important matter, and still not have a clue, since then, about what kw is pulling on them?

Ach, if I had the answer to that, I'd bottle it and sell it.

They end by quoting Ken Wilber:

Evolution goes beyond what went before, but because it must embrace what went before, then its very nature is to transcend and include [and thus to become more complex], and thus it has an inherent directionality, a secret impulse [of progress] toward increasing depth, increasing intrinsic value, increasing consciousness.

But, as Jeff Meyerhoff had noted, in his Dismissal Vs. Debate:

For Wilber, progress ... is determined by increased complexity defined as greater transcendence and inclusion.

[I]t may just seem obvious that life began with the simplest of organisms and now there is a diverse array of highly complex species, suggesting that there is an overall trend towards greater complexity, with humans, and their exclusive use of language, large brains and complicated social lives, appearing to be the most complicated beings.

Stephen J. Gould's Full House is a sustained examination of the topic of progress in evolution and he argues against this common-sense view. He observes that since life starts with simplicity, any change will generate some complexity (since life cannot evolve to be simpler than the simplest), but that increasing complexity is not a necessary or even common evolutionary occurrence. Many biological organisms find their adaptive success [i.e., their "survivability"] in becoming simpler after a more complex beginning [and thus not "including" all that went before them in their own evolution]....

So Wilber cannot use survivability as his criterion of progress [as he does in SES] because then he will have no justification for structuring his entire integral hierarchy around increased complexity. His whole model of universal movement from the Big Bang to the present moment as one of directed evolution towards increased complexity is seriously skewed towards a relatively minor natural phenomenon....

(Wilber's unsupportable notions of progress, here, are actually very similar to his sleight-of-hand claims of change implying development.)

All that, plus numerology, astrology, Sheldrake's morphogenic fields, Laszlo's akashic fields, DNA-modifying aliens from outer space ... I tell ya, that "integral evolution" is somethin' else....

I was reading through Frank Visser's Wilber Watch blog on this lazy Saturday afternoon, and was eventually led to this posting from the ex-CEO of Integral Institute. (Yes, it's old news, but if you think I've been joking about having 101 things I'd rather be doing than dealing with anything Wilberian....)

Anyway, very interesting to learn that Integral University had a staff of one running it!

There is no Integral University plan. IU is nothing more than an idea. There are no resources allocated and funds to build IU. There is no business plan. There is no strategy, no budget, and no staff. There never was. IU like many I-I projects has been mostly talk with little real action. No one really knows what it is supposed to be. There isn't even a simple two page overview that I could find....

The Integral Books concept is mostly shut down now as there is no dedicated personnel assigned no budget and no real project plan. It has always been just a seat of the pants kind of implementation with one full time editor assigned. That editor quit a few months ago. The good news is that there are few books that are mostly done, but Ken has the final word on if they get published or not. Ken's veto power on Integral Books is a problem.

I'll bet. Not to mention all of the other dysfunctionalities which follow from kw's authoritarian approach to leadership. ("No second-tier nourishment for you!")

More:

When I took the CEO role on Sept 1st, Ken quickly communicated a concern that Membership had been launched in June but I-I wasn't even close to publishing a magazine. (you can see the premiums provided for membership, including receiving the Integralist, on the Join Us page http://www.integralinstitute.org/public/static/joinmem.aspx)

I found the whole concept a bit confusing given that Ken was instrumental in designing the Membership program. How did I-I think a magazine was going to show up? No one at I-I seemed to have ever given the reality of publishing a magazine much thought....

The Marketing team, led by Casey Capshaw, were quick to accept leadership in getting things done and were making great strides in moving I-I forward. Recently Ken has attacked this team of all young men. He has suggested that they were the majority of a sub-culture in alliance with me, that they were all very Orange and all very masculine.

Also funny to read that Wilber will be giving the Boomeritis (i.e., novelization) treatment to his forthcoming The Many Faces of Terrorism. (Suggested title: Terroritis.)

What I can't get over is this: In the real business world, there's a little thing called an NDA—a non-disclosure agreement. Even the lowliest peon has to sign one, to prevent ... well, to prevent exactly what went on after that CEO left I-I, i.e., the public airing of "inside" information which the corporation would rather bury. You can actually be held financially responsible if "classified" information you share after you leave ends up harming the company. (Or why do you think I haven't spilled every detail of how I got screwed over by "Bungler and the Ho" [i.e., the married CEO and president] back at the ever-bumbling Shitvantex Disloyalty Marketing?)

Of course, if Wilber is really the one doing the hiring of the upper management, there, it's not surprising that he missed out on that "small point": Aside from washing dishes and stocking grocery-store shelves (I've done plenty of both, too) to support himself while writing his early books, has he ever had a real job? What does he know of how the business world works? Apparently, absolutely nothing.

Can't believe the number of blog-commentators out there still think that Wilber is a genius, though. Talk about people who just will not learn—i.e., who may have largely untangled themselves from worshipping their "guru"/pandit, but who still can't/won't see how the whole philosophy was a load of bullshit from the beginning.

KW is a "genius writer" but an incompetent manager? Well, they're half right....

I think the Wizard of Oz is a poor choice of comparison the Wizard is found to be a useless cripple and a fraud....

Yes, exactly.

Bono and Geldof blamed Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper for blocking a more generous [G8] deal.

"It's as if we have the place bugged because everybody tells us," Bono said of his sources at the summit's closed-doors negotiations. "And we know who's causing the trouble and who isn't. And we know that Canada blocked progress." (more)

What can I say—I sure didn't vote for Harper....

The NXNE music festival is currently going on in Toronto.

Ideas for band names:

• Marvin and the Paranoid Androids

• DJ J.D. Power

• Joe Cocker Spaniel

• Horton and the Whos

• Billy Goat and the Gruffs

"What do you mean it isn't 'all ages'?"

Used to jotting down daily notes on animal breeding, [Charles Darwin] scrawled rambling thoughts about career and prospects on two scraps of paper, one with columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry." Advantages included "constant companion and a friend in old age ... better than a dog anyhow," against points such as "less money for books" and "terrible loss of time." Having decided in favour, he discussed it with his father, then went to visit Emma on 29 July 1838. He did not get around to proposing, but against his father's advice he mentioned his ideas on transmutation (Wikipedia).

"Transmutation," eh? Is that what they were calling it back then?

From Scott Parker's Winning the Integral Game?:

For years I was a fan of Ken Wilber, with emphasis on the word fan against another, preferable word: student. Instead of reading Wilber, a la Kant, as someone with ideas to be considered and argued with, I came to read him as the definitive authority on reality....

Over the last several years, Wilber and his fans have become so fluent in the language of Integral, Integral-this and Integral-that, that they have effectively created an in-group/out-group scenario reminiscent of the blue meme's good and evil, that they are so (rightly) critical of. You're either for Integral or against it. (And if you have a different definition of Integral, it's wrong....)

Unfortunately, instead of engaging critics and showing some humility, Wilber is further insulating all things Integral. And the whole movement around him now appears destined to become, isolated as it is, a cult, and soon after, lose whatever relevance it may have had in the scholarly world.

Always encouraging to see that the criticisms of kw are having some effect, even if only on a small percentage of his followers—the ones who would be the most worth keeping in that community, but who must instead be "cast from the faithful" for their doubting of Wilber's view of reality.

Meta-Genius: A Celebration of Ken's Writings.

The rate at which that man can create wrong ideas, based on misrepresented/fabricated information, and then find utterly uninformed "integral believers" to gush in awe over them, is truly astonishing. The Muktananda-defending Kempton, Edgar Mitchell, Michael Murphy, Roger Walsh, Chopra—people who just will not learn to think critically, or do any proper reality-testing of their ideas, lest it turn out that what they desperately want and need to believe isn't actually true. All tripping over themselves to endorse the half-baked ideas of the "twenty-first century, integral Velikovsky."

Kinda funny that they quote Bauwens in support of SES, given that he's more recently said:

At one point in our lives, we may seek a system of systems that may put to rest of fears of paradoxes and contradictions, showing how different truth claims can nevertheless be all true at some higher level of integration. But at another point in your life, if you are not intellectually and spiritually lazy, you have to learn again to live with the uncertainty of knowledge, and then, frankly, any reliance of a total edifice a la Wilber becomes counterproductive.

I wonder if the addled sycophants posting that "celebration" even know about that change in Bauwens' view; I find it hard to believe they would have included his name if they did know.

During the period that Ken was practicing Zen in a particularly intense fashion, he gave 50% of his royalties from No Boundary to the Zen Center of Los Angeles, whose teacher was Maezumi Roshi, with whom Ken had a special connection and gratitude.

I already had this quote in STG:

[I]t became known that Maezumi had had a number of affairs with female students and had also entered a dry-out clinic for alcoholics.

—Andrew Rawlinson, The Book of Enlightened Masters

I suppose in the best case kw's royalties might have gone to pay for his teacher's rehab. Or at least for a nice bottle of wine over dinner with one or more of the female students which the holy jerk was fucking.

If you're going to learn, learn from the best, eh?

Anyway, I've been reading Jürgen Neffe's biography of Albert Einstein recently. I had no idea that (p. 27) "it was Einstein who suggested that the Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget ask children about their intuitive notions of speed, space, and time, and thereby provided the stimulus for one of Piaget's most fruitful areas of research."

Real science, done by real scientists, and properly reality-tested. The world needs more of it, y'know?

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