There is a difference between, as it were, negligence, which is random in its effects, i.e., if you are a sloppy or bad [source of information], the mistakes you make will be all over the place. They will not actually support any particular point of view.... On the other hand, if all the mistakes are in the same direction in the support of a particular thesis, then I do not think that is mere negligence. I think that is a deliberate manipulation and deception. (Richard Evans)

SINCE THE RELEASE OF STRIPPING THE GURUS in April of 2005 I have done much additional debunking of the unreliable work of Ken Wilber, as posted on my blog. I have summarized that recent (blogged) work below, in sections concerning kw’s

• Misunderstanding and misrepresentation of Darwinian evolution (and animal cannibalism) versus Intelligent Design

• Hyping of (faulty protocol) studies done by Skip Alexander to “prove” the efficacy of meditation in purportedly advancing human beings through stages of psychological development

• Endorsement of the “Maharishi Effect” and Q-Link pendant, and false insistence that the existence of parapsychological phenomena is “one hundred percent certain”

• Claims that human beings typically do not transform psychologically between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-five

• Outright bullshitting of “integral” music-industry professionals regarding their own areas of expertise

Much of that debunking was sparked by emails from Jim Andrews, whose insights and text I have freely incorporated, particularly in the beginnings of the sections on animal cannibalism, the purported benefits and dangers of meditation, the value of prayer, the “Maharishi Effect,” the efficiency of yellow versus green memes, and Wilber’s claim that only young “geeks” and older “geezers” typically undergo psychological transformations.

In May of 2005, Wilber offered a rather hasty defense of his documented misunderstandings of high-school-level evolution theory. From Integral Naked, via the Vomiting Confetti blog:

Folks, give me a break on this one. I have a Master’s degree in biochemistry, and a Ph.D. minus thesis in biochemistry and biophysics, with specialization in the mechanism of the visual process. I did my thesis on the photoisomerization of rhodopsin in bovine rod outer segments. I know evolutionary theory inside out, including the works of Dawkins et al. The material of mine that is being quoted is extremely popularized and simplified material for a lay audience. Publicly, virtually all scientists subscribe to neo-Darwinian theory. Privately, real scientists—that is, those of us with graduate degrees in science who have professionally practiced it—don’t believe hardly any of its crucial tenets. Instead of a religious preacher like Dawkins, start with something like Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution. And then guess what? Neo-Darwinian theory can’t explain shit. Deal with it.

The extensive problems with evolutionary theory as it now stands is exactly why “creation science” has made huge inroads across the country, including standing up in court cases where scientific evidence is brought in on both sides. The problem is that creation scientists—who are almost entirely Christians—after having convincingly demonstrated that neo-Darwinian theory has loopholes large enough to drive several Hummers through—then try to prove that Jehovah is in one of the Hummers. But, of course, the fact that neo-Darwinian theory cannot explain the central aspects of evolution, does not mean that a specific type of God can. But they never would make the kind of headway they have unless neo-Darwinian theory is the piece of Swiss cheese that it is.

But all that this really proves, in my opinion, is that there is an Eros to the Kosmos, an Eros that scientific evolutionary theory as it is simply cannot explain. But overall integral theory doesn’t hang on that particular issue. If physicalistic, materialistic, reductionistic forces turn out to give an adequate explanation to the extraordinary diversity of evolutionary unfolding, then fine, that is what we will include in integral theory. And if not, not. But so far, the “nots” have it by a staggeringly huge margin, and scientists when they are not bragging to the world, whisper this to themselves every single day of their lives. I know, I lived in that community for the better part of a decade. And it’s truly fascinating, to say the least....

This is a great thread, from what I have seen of it, and I hope it continues. But please don’t do so by claiming that I don’t know evolutionary theory, because in that particular instance anyway, you are absolutely off your nut.

Well, no. First, none of the above alters the fact that Wilber has completely misrepresented the truth that half-wings do exist, and have been documented as existing since Darwin’s own Origin of Species. That has nothing to do with any (excusable) popularizing of Wilber’s theories on his own part. Rather, it is simply a gross and brutally dishonest misrepresentation of basic facts on his part, to suit his own slanted purposes. That is true independent of whether or not Wilber understands how evolution works.

Since when, though, is one allowed to misrepresent such elementary facts as the above, even in popularizing one’s ideas? What respected academic has ever done that?! Simplifying the Ph.D.-level complexities is one thing; misrepresenting high-school-level ideas (with no caveats whatsoever to that effect in the text!) is another issue entirely. (Plus, the points on which kw has screwed up are literally taught in high school. So for whom was he “dumbing down” those ideas, if even high-school students can understand them in their real nature?)

So, is Wilber then saying that, even while he was claiming that half-wings have “no adaptive value whatsoever,” and that “you are dinner” should you evolve them, he still knew damned well that the very same half-wings do exist, and that they do confer an evolutionary advantage? Is he saying that he deliberately deceived people on that point?

If that deception is actually deliberate ... on what other points do you think he might have been utilizing exactly the same “skillful means” to get you to agree with him? That is, what of his other claims can you afford to trust, if he’s (apparently) admitted to having deliberately deceived you on that point?

“Popularization” does not mean misrepresenting basic, high-school-level scientific facts! If Wilber has actually deliberately done that, that’s arguably worse than if he simply hadn’t understood the ideas in the first place!

Further, note that Wilber misrepresents David Bohm’s ideas every bit as much as he does for Darwinian evolution. Presumably he thinks that he knows Bohmian physics “inside out,” too, what with his near-Ph.D. in biophysics. He doesn’t. Not even close.

And as to Michael Behe: While I would not wish to counter Wilber’s embarrassingly unsound “argument from authority” only with equally facile arguments from other (skeptical) authorities, two seconds of research (on “Behe Darwin”) at csicop.org nevertheless discloses:

Intelligent Design has been a wholesale failure, as both science and strategy. None of its scientific claims, especially the work of the main theorists William Dembski and Michael Behe, have stood up under scientific scrutiny. None of their claims is [sic] published in scientific journals. Numerous books and articles refute their positions in great detail. Not only have their arguments been shown to be flawed, but in several instances, the factual claims on which they rest have been proven false. (Stenger, 2004)

If you take Behe seriously, please further read Edis’ paper, and Pigliucci’s critique of Intelligent Design theory and Neocreationism. From the latter:

To be sure, there are several cases in which biologists do not know enough about the fundamental constituents of the cell to be able to hypothesize or demonstrate their gradual evolution. But this is rather an argument from ignorance, not positive evidence of irreducible complexity. William Paley advanced exactly the same argument to claim that it is impossible to explain the appearance of the eye by natural means. Yet, today biologists know of several examples of intermediate forms of the eye, and there is evidence that this structure evolved several times independently during the history of life on Earth.

Nice example; and ironic, too, given Wilber’s own research with cow’s eyes, and his consistent use of the same type of sophomoric “arguments from ignorance” to find room for his own transpersonal notions and naïve acceptance of parapsychological claims, within real science.

You want more? How about this, from The New Yorker:

Although the [Intelligent Design] movement is loosely allied with, and heavily funded by, various conservative Christian groups—and although I.D. plainly maintains that life was created—it is generally silent about the identity of the creator.

Not exactly Jehovah in a Hummer, then, is it?

And kw’s claim that integral theorizers will abide by physical science if it can “explain everything” is extremely disingenuous: He will do no such thing, ever. For, his “theories” have been shot through with koshas (i.e., subtle bodies), auras, subtle energies, chakras and the like from the start. That is, he has made his living, from the beginning, theorizing on the basis of completely unvetted and unsound data, and continues to do so to the present day. That’s certainly one way to waste a life, but it’s also a good recipe to have all of your grand “theories” come crashing down, as their data items are discredited, one by one. If you listen very carefully, you can hear that happening to kw’s half-baked integral notions right now, in his daft inclusion of the ideas of Gary Schwartz, Hiroshi Motoyama, Rupert Sheldrake and Hiroshi Motoyama, in his own work.

So what we have here from Wilber is, as usual, no documented facts, no relevant details, just his “Einsteinian” authority, his rampant hyperbole, and a laughable appeal to other discredited “thinkers” to back up his own claims to expertise. Beautiful! “Folks” (as kw would colloquially say), it doesn’t get any more competent than that in transpersonal/integral studies!

If Wilber wants to make wild-eyed claims about the “failures” of Darwinian evolution in courtroom contexts and otherwise, he needs to do way more than simply throw out a smoke-screen of unsubstantiated claims (plus one book title). No one should feel obliged to take seriously such assertions from kw in particular anyway, given his documented penchant for misrepresentation and pure fabrication (cf. Wilber vs. Bohm).

For three decades he has gotten away with tossing out laundry lists of names of authorities whose writings purportedly give support to his notions, apparently confident that no one will actually go back to the source materials to verify his (frequently false) claims for that support. In other contexts, even just colloquial ones, that would be seen for the “bullshit artistry” which it truly is. And certainly, in no other field could one ever rise to the status of an “Einstein” on such (half-)wings of outright nonsense. Only in humanistic/transpersonal/integral studies (okay, in all applications of postmodernism, too)....

And why did it take Wilber nearly a decade to give any response at all (however inadequate and authoritarian, as the above most certainly is) to what is effectively just more of David Lane’s critique of his misunderstandings of basic evolution, from 1996? Did he think that devastating critique was just going to go away? And note: Lane actually endorsed Wilber’s [1983] A Sociable God, saying that it was “not only destined to become a classic, but also adds further testimony to the fact that Wilber may singlehandedly alter the course of future research in consciousness.” That is, Lane—like myself—began as an admirer of Wilber, but just kept thinking and researching. And that is all that anyone actually needs to do, to extricate himself from Wilber’s slanted version of reality. That, though, is also why the transpersonal and integral communities will ever fail to competently police themselves: people who keep reading outside of the field, into skeptical perspectives, predictably soon leave the field. All that is left, then, are the ones who cannot do competent research to save their lives, or otherwise face the basic facts of reality.

Wilber’s comparing of neo-Darwinism to a “Swiss cheese” is very nice, too, considering that I used exactly the same analogy, explicitly, to describe kw’s own simplistic notions, near the end of the Norman Einstein chapter, in the midst of documenting a full 90 typeset pages of his inexcusable blunders. So he has either read that chapter (and learned nothing from it), or is still blissfully unaware of it.

It is Wilber’s own inexcusably sloppy research and daft theorizings that are “Swiss cheese,” and which “can’t explain shit.” Real science can “explain shit” quite nicely, thank you.

All you need to do is to read kw’s books carefully—albeit with much more care than he ever brought to writing them—and compare their contents with the original source materials (e.g., Darwin, Bohm, Aurobindo, Jung, Graves/SD) which he claims support his view. Simply do that, and Wilber’s addled notions consistently self-destruct.

None of this, again, has anything to do with simple popularizations of integral theories, were those to be done with proper forthrightness. It is rather just an appeal to basic intellectual honesty and minimal academic competence. Other fields of knowledge have that. That is what makes them worth spending time understanding.

And what does real science, then, have to say about Behe and his ilk?

[I]n 2002, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) passed a resolution declaring “intelligent design” to be a “philosophical or theological concept,” not a statement obtained through the examination of hard evidence, and that it should not be taught in science classes. That’s 120,000 men and women of science, honored and respected internationally, who have the experience, the knowledge, and the training to be able to understand and authoritatively declare on such matters.

So which “real scientists,” exactly, are the ones which Wilber thinks are siding with him? Perhaps the following, from the Skeptical Investigations website:

In a new paper Ted Dace contends that the dispute between the rival views of evolution is between two failed theories. The mechanistic ideology of neo-Darwinism weakens the case for evolution and leaves the field clear for Creationism. Sheldrake and Elsasser have found a basis for the inheritance of adaptations making this endless clash of ideologies redundant.

As an exercise for anyone with even a high-school knowledge of how evolution works: Poke SUV-sized holes in the following, embarrassingly wilber-esque objections to neo-Darwinian evolution, from the same paper:

The Hyacinth macaw can crack a nut with its beak that you or I would need a sledgehammer to open. Is all that colossal strength nothing more than a side-effect of a chance mutation in the macaw’s genetic toolkit? How many millions of such coding mistakes had to come and go before the right one announced itself, and at last the bird got its meal?

So stupendously unlikely is the perfect mutation at the perfect time that calculating the odds against it taking place even once exceeds our imaginative capacity. It is, in fact, a miracle.

Note again that Wilber has (unconvincingly) claimed that he was deliberately oversimplifying his comparable presentation of the mechanism of evolution—and thus intentionally deceiving his readers—in a book intended for the general public (A Brief History of Everything). Yet, his cohorts in “integral skepticism” quite clearly believe exactly what he claims to have purposely wrongly presented.

Whether or not any of the other avant-garde claims made in Dace’s paper are valid, when perfect nonsense (or deliberate deceptions, take your pick) like the above is presented as if it were insightful wisdom, one is being generous in even reading further.

It is frequently not at all easy to tell which side of the skeptic vs. believer debate is telling you the truth (cf. Sheldrake vs. Richard Wiseman, or Sheldrake vs. Randi, or Randi vs. the Dogon). Blatant misrepresentations like the above from Dace, though, make it a little easier.

Interestingly, Sheldrake, Brian Josephson, Larry Dossey and Gary Schwartz are all “Associates and Advisors” of the same Skeptical Investigations group. Dossey and Schwartz are also both founding members of Wilber’s Integral Institute.

So, presumably we can look forward to Dace’s paper being featured proudly on Wilber’s Integral University, when that institute of unlearning finally goes public....

However, a chapter (“The Plausibility of Adaptations for Homicide,” by Joshua D. Duntley and David M. Buss) in a scholarly book on human consciousness, The Innate Mind: Structure And Contents (Oxford University Press, 2005), lists:

• Female sexual cannibalism in insects (mantids, black widow spiders, jumping spiders, and scorpions)

• Killing of the offspring of rival males in mammals (lions, wolves, hyenas, cougars, and cheetahs)

• Intraspecies infanticide in primates (langur monkeys, red howler monkeys, mountain gorillas, chimpanzees, and others)

• “The killing of rival, adult males has also been well documented among mountain gorillas ... and the chimpanzees of Gombe ..., two of our closest genetic relatives”

More about animal cannibalism:

• “The term cannibalism is also used in zoology to describe species who prey upon their own kind, such as lions, crabs, ants, and some kinds of fish” (The Columbia Encyclopedia)

• “In zoology, the eating of any animal by another member of the same species. Certain ants regularly consume injured immatures and, when food is scarce, eat healthy immatures; this practice allows the adults to survive the food shortage and live to breed again. Male lions taking over a pride may kill and eat the existing young. After losing her cubs the mother will become impregnated by the new dominant male, thereby ensuring his genetic contribution. Aquarium guppies sometimes regulate their population size by eating most of their young” (Encyclopedia Britannica)

• There is even a children’s book (for those budding integral scholars ages ten to twelve) on this subject: Cannibal Animals: Animals That Eat Their Own Kind by Anthony D. Fredericks. The first chapter has the following statement: “Biologists have estimated that there are more than 1300 kinds of cannibal animals—species that eat members of their own kind”

Plus, we all learned, in high-school biology, that the female praying mantis (i.e., of the “mantids” above) cannibalizes the male after sex.

Even as early as 1978, Time magazine (Vol. 111, No. 2) had a story “Animals That Kill Their Young.” The article begins:

In his classic work On Aggression, Nobel Laureate Konrad Lorenz argued that man is the only species that regularly kills its own kind. This concept, which contrasted the order and restraint in the animal world with the chaotic aggressiveness of man, reflected the mood of the time: the shadow-of-the-Bomb pessimism of the ’50s and early ’60s. But Lorenz was wrong; since 1963, when his book was published, naturalists have identified dozens of species that kill their own, including lions, hippos, bears, wolves, hyenas, herring gulls and more than fifteen types of primates other than man.

Lorenz’s On Aggression is item #267 in the bibliography for Wilber’s (1981) Up from Eden—being a woefully outdated source of information even at that point. Note, though, that even when kw has updated his “expert” knowledge (as of 2003), he is still more than twenty-five years behind anything resembling a competent, current understanding of the field. Children’s books, in all seriousness, are better sources of information, being written by authors who are better informed than the “Einstein of consciousness research”!

In Up from Eden, Wilber further had this to say regarding the supposed psychological and spiritual causes underlying war and the “substitute sacrifice” of human murder:

[U]nder the desire to kill lies the extroverted death impact, and under death impact lies the pull of transcendence. Murder, that is, is a form of substitute sacrifice or substitute transcendence. Homicide is the new form of the Atman project. The deepest wish of all is to sacrifice one’s self—“kill” it—so as to find true transcendence and Atman; but, failing that, one arranges the substitute sacrifice of actually killing somebody else, thus acting on, and appeasing, the terrifying confrontation with death and Thanatos....

I am not denying the existence of simple, instinctive, biological aggression, in mammals or in humans. The coyote does aggress—but not out of hatred. As Ashley Montagu put it, the coyote doesn’t kill the rabbit because it hates the rabbit but because it loves the rabbit the way I love ice cream. Man—and only man—regularly kills out of hatred, and for that we will have to look elsewhere than the genes....

I am suggesting that, in the cognitive elaboration between simple biological aggression and wanton human murder, death and death terror become all-significantly interwoven into the final motivation....

Thus, whatever natural aggression may be innately present in humans, the significant point is that it is amplified through conceptual domains, and part of that amplification includes the heightened apprehension of death, which, when turned outward, explodes into really vicious aggression and hostility, and in proportions not given instinctually. And that murderous hostility is pre-eminently the substitute sacrifice, a killing of others to magically buy off the death of the self. The original death terror becomes death-dealing; and there is the human source of joyous murder....

Aggression and mass homicide, in the form of war, generally began ... with the [agrarian] mythic-membership structure.

And yet, from the December, 1995, National Geographic article by Peter Miller (p. 106) on “Jane Goodall,” concerning Goodall’s decades-long field studies of chimps in Tanzania:

“When I first started at Gombe, I thought the chimps were nicer than we are,” Jane recalls wistfully. “But time has revealed that they are not. They can be just as awful.”

Frequently tender and compassionate, humanity’s closest living relatives are also capable of scheming, deceiving, and waging war. It came as a shock to Jane in 1974 when patrols of chimpanzees from the Kasakela community—one of four groups in the 20-square-mile park—began attacking chimps from the Kahama community to the south. She was stunned by reports of stealthy warriors moving through the forest in single file, hair bristling from fear and excitement, stepping from stone to stone to avoid making noise in what came to be known as the Four Year War.

By the end of the conflict, the Kahama community—seven males and three adult females and their young—had been annihilated. Researchers witnessed five of the attacks, in which the Kasakela chimps tore at their victims’ flesh with their teeth as if they were common prey.

Goodall’s best guess as to the origins of that extermination? That the territorial Kasakela males were taking back land which they had previously occupied. That was purely a guess on her part, though, to try and make sense of the chimps’ actions.

Further, the warring of those chimps was disclosed by Goodall as early as a May, 1979, National Geographic article—several years before Wilber’s copyrighting of Up from Eden.

So, quite obviously, Wilber has once again inexcusably gotten his basic facts wrong, here. (That is even aside from his more-recent admission that 58% of foraging [i.e., pre-agrarian, pre-mythic-membership] cultures engaged in “frequent or intermittent warfare.” Yet amazingly, as recently as 1996, in the same A Brief History of Everything, he was still insisting that apes do not make war! [Chimps are apes of equatorial Africa.]) If one sticks to the properly vetted data, rather than just making things up out of thin air, it is clear that chimps (and dolphins too, apparently) are just as capable of extended warring as are human beings, for what look to be quite comparable reasons and emotions.

One assumes, though, that any “cognizance of their own mortality,” and consequent transpersonally hypothesized “substitute sacrifice” on the part of the chimps and dolphins, wouldn’t really enter into it!

Foraging (i.e., pre-agrarian) yet war-making chimps—having a lifespan of from thirty to fifty years—exist in rigidly hierarchical societies led by alpha males. And, as the 1995 National Geographic article on Goodall noted, “like neighborhood bosses, [they] engage in much handshaking, back-slapping, and hugging as they form shifting alliances.” Likewise, a female student questioner once asked Jane Goodall about what happens when an adolescent female chimp joins a new community. Goodall replied that the males are predictably delighted, but the females beat her up. “One strategy the newcomer can use, however, is to attach herself to a high-ranking female, even if she is treated badly by that female. The others will eventually accept her.” As the questioner observed in response, that “sounds just like high school.”

None of that documented behavior, of course, requires one to postulate any drive to transcendence, or anything else transpersonal, in the “kosmos”!

Dr. Goodall, interestingly, has had her own “spiritual awakening”:

From her description, her experience seemed to be a pure consciousness experience—a sensate-only experience of the purity and perfection of the actual world. Thinking about it afterwards, she felt the experience must have been a mystical experience or a spiritual revelation—simply because there was no other explanation available to her. This experience proved to be a turning point in her life—she changed from skeptic to spiritualist, from scientist to savior, from feeling lonely to being loved, from feeling hopelessness to having a “reason for hope.” She saw human evolution as the eventual triumph of Good over Evil and began to cement her place as a champion of the good in the battle against evil—a Savior, not only of Mother Earth and “her” creatures, but also of Humankind.

And it is, of course, just a short step from that to Goodall’s vouching for Ammachi, the “Hugging Avatar,” as being “God’s love in a human body.”

Well, at least Goodall got some genuine science done before going all wonky. Not every “enlightened, integral” being can say that.

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

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

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

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

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

KW makes comparable claims in The Eye of the Spirit:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Warning: Meditating May Be Hazardous to Your Health by Sandy Brundage
  
  
• Subjective Reports by Michael Murphy and Steven Donovan
  
  
• TM Dissenter’s FAQ
  
  
• Is Meditation Good for You? by Susan Blackmore
  
  
• Research Demonstrating Harmful Effects from TM
  
  

You would undoubtedly want to know those sort of things before caving in to Wilber’s pressures to meditate—and his quoting of research showing the purported “good effects” of meditation on similar practitioners of the same methods of meditation. You will not, however, get that information from any of his publications.

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

Wilber continues, in the same audio program:

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

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

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

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

That would be impressive if it were true. But the only “proof” which kw ever gives of such claims comes, again, from the endnotes in The Eye of Spirit, where we learn:

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

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

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

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

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

If one actually makes the effort to wade through the relevant chapter in Alexander and Langer’s Higher Stages of Human Development, past the 40+ pages of whackadoodle “Vedic theory” and respectful references to the Maharishi’s “seven levels of consciousness,” one finally reaches the Research Appendix. There, all of the juicy details of Alexander’s “solid and ... repeated” research (in Wilber’s unduly optimistic evaluation) are revealed.

Details like these, from pages 331-2 of Alexander’s book:

In two samples (total n = 90) of maximum security prisoners followed over a one-year period, both long-term and new TM subjects significantly improved by one step on ego development in comparison to wait-list controls, dropouts, and those not interested in learning TM (controlling for pretest scores and demographic covariates). None of the four other treatment groups followed longitudinally changed significantly on this measure (Alexander, 1982). On the average, regular new meditators (who scored at a concrete operational level at pretest) improved from the “conformist” stage of ego development (corresponding to dominance of concrete thinking) to the “self-aware” level (corresponding to the onset of reflective functioning of the intellect); and regular advanced meditators shifted from the self-aware level to a “conscientious” stage (corresponding to a mature form of abstract reflection).

This advance of one step for the new meditators over a year period substantially exceeds that for college students over a four-year period (Loevinger et al., 1985), yet at an age (26-29 years) and education level (ninth grade) where such changes are unlikely to occur. Assuming [!!] that the advanced TM subjects started at a comparable ego level to the new TM group, they advanced a mean of two steps during less than three years.

So that is presumably where Wilber has gotten his “four years” and “two stages” information from, in his Kosmic Consciousness claim that “if you take people ... and they meditate about a hour a day, then about four years later, they’re two stages higher on any scale we give them.”

Further, again from Wilber’s Kosmic Consciousness talks:

Another way to measure [the value of meditation] is to take the number of people that are at a particular stage of development in a particular development line like Jane Loevinger, and in her case, what she would call our level six, our integral level on our seven-level generic scale, she finds about 2 percent of the population reaches that stage. And after four years of meditation, 38 percent of people doing it reach that stage.

And from The Eye of Spirit:

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

But: It was eleven years of meditation, not four, that got 38 percent of Alexander’s subjects to test at the autonomous/integrated level! From p. 332-3 of Alexander’s book:

A longitudinal study ... compared change in ego development over an 11-year period in graduates from Maharishi International University (MIU), where the TM program is incorporated into the college curriculum, to change in graduates from three well-known universities offering standard curricula.... From the pool of respondents from each of the control universities, students were matched as closely as possible with MIU graduates on gender, pretest age, and college class (i.e., cohort group). All subjects (total n = 136) were at least 19 years of age at pretest during the late 1970s. Most MIU graduates were currently regular in TM practice; most control subjects also indicated that they currently practiced some form of self-development, stress-management, or exercise program for promoting physical and mental health (although none practiced TM)....

Whereas at pretest 9 percent of the MIU sample scored at Loevinger’s higher “autonomous” and “integrated” stages, at posttest 38 percent reached these two highest stages.

So, when Wilber says that four years of meditation got 38 percent of subjects to the “integral level,” that’s just plain false, from a man who cannot even quote the protocols from a simple longitudinal study accurately.

(Likewise, ten years of TM practice underlay the study that had 87 percent scoring above the conscientious level. Page 333 of Alexander’s book makes that explicit.)

In the “38 percent” study, too, the meditators were self-selected, even though later being “matched up” (=> potential rater/selection bias) against their control peers. So, that group went from 9 percent of them being autonomous/integrated to 38 percent of them being at those levels, while the “control” group had only 1 percent at those “two highest stages at both pretest and posttest.” In a total of a mere 136 subjects from MIU and three control universities.

Since, in that prison study, “most control subjects also indicated that they currently practiced some form of self-development, stress-management, or exercise program,” with mere exercise being lumped in with “self-development,” and no indication as to what percentage of that “control” group was practicing forms of meditation other than TM ... it’s really no proper “control” group at all. (That prison study, amazingly, was Alexander’s 1982 doctoral dissertation at Harvard. Makes ya wonder what they’re smokin’ out there in New England, that such a hopelessly muddled approach to experimentation would even have been green-lighted, much less be worthy of a Ph.D. Have these “real geniuses” never heard of properly randomized, placebo-controlled protocol?)

Even if there was no selection or rater bias involved there, having only 136 total subjects means that exactly one person in the control group was at autonomous/integrated before, and after, the testing. So, there we have absurdly small sample sizes for measuring states of development that are rare to begin with. Further, consider that people on the verge of breaking through to the higher levels, or those having an explicit interest in and expectation for psychological growth, etc., might well choose to meditate and/or enroll in MIU from that cause, thus introducing a non-causal correlation between meditation and psychological stage-growth as the study proceeded. (Such interests and expectations can affect one’s performance on written tests of maturity, too. That is, expectation effects apply to those tests, even if expectations themselves don’t create psychological stage-growth. Loevinger had to explicitly take that into account in planning the testing for her 1985 study. Alexander evidently has not proceeded with the same competence.)

Given all that, Alexander’s studies, so foolishly valued and unduly praised by Wilber, have proved nothing.

The growth from 9 percent to 38 percent may well be causative rather than a mere correlation; who knows? But with Alexander’s shoddy selection protocols and otherwise, a four-fold growth from 1 percent to 4 percent in their “control” group could have been just as significant, and meant exactly the same thing. For the sample size used (control group of ~65?), that growth from 1 percent to 4 percent represents just a couple of people in the control group breaking through!

So there are issues there, not merely with regard to protocol, but even just in terms of basic statistical significance.

And, note that 9 percent of the final 38 percent were already at the integral level when the study began. Assuming that there was no measurable regression of the subjects’ levels in that study, then as far as growth to that level goes: Only 38% - 9% = 27% of the subjects grew to the integral level, of the 100% - 9% = 91% who weren’t already at it. That is, only 27/91 = 32% who weren’t already “spiritually evolved” managed to grow to the integral level. Over a period of eleven years. Conversely, 68 percent didn’t experience the same growth.

And that’s supposed to be the (in Wilber’s words) “doorway to God”? Something that (even neglecting all of the serious problems in the protocol) only works in any significant way for one-third of the people, over a period of more than a decade of regular practice?!

And for the two-thirds who did not thus grow, what might they have productively done with their lives in the hours which they had otherwise devoted to meditation? What have they lost, in sitting and chanting nonsense-syllables to themselves?

Interestingly, the above-mentioned study by Jane Loevinger, et al. (“Ego Development in College,” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1985, Vol. 48 (4), 947-62) showed female university students demonstrating a “slight but consistent loss” of ego development from their freshman to their senior years. That loss, in turn, “challenges one assumption of a widely accepted version of Piagetian theory (i.e., that stage development is irreversible).”

Conversely, though, as Loevinger notes, “Piaget can hardly be cited for the frequent assumption that moral or ego development occurs according to a strict stage sequence, rarely admitting of backsliding. In his study of the development of moral judgment, Piaget (1932) went out of his way to reiterate that there are no strict stages. Even with respect to capacity for formal operations, Piaget (1972) warned of backsliding in young adults outside their own specialties.”

(Wilber actually admits that such regression can occur, as does Alexander. KW, however, qualifies [via Grof] the causes of that regression by saying that “under intense stress, or with certain types of meditation, or certain drugs, the self can regress to this [lowest] fulcrum and relive its various subphases and traumas, which tends to alleviate the pathology.” None of those factors, of course, have anything to do with being “outside of one’s formop specialties.” Nor was the regression found in Loevinger’s study merely a short-term, coping response to “intense stress,” etc.)

Obviously, if one can backslide from formop even just for being “outside of one’s specialties,” attempting to correlate such stages of psychological development with three other quadrants (objective, cultural and social), as Wilber does, would become something of a bitch, as they say.

Of further interest, Loevinger notes that dormitory/fraternity/sorority life has been found to have a “constricting rather than a liberalizing effect with respect particularly to critical thinking,” and thus to one’s higher scoring on measures of psychological maturity. The worst possible combination for encouraging psychological growth, then, would surely be to live in a fraternity-like residence under a leader who can ostensibly do no wrong.

Ashrams, anyone? Or even, Integral Institutes, anyone? Because even without living in residence in the latter, good luck with trying to deeply question the “spiritually advanced” leaders if you hope to remain a member in good standing in that cult-like community. Rather, use your own mind in that environment to think critically about what you’re being fed, and you will very quickly be demoted to the status of “untrustworthy asshole.” That, after all, is exactly how I myself have been explicitly denigrated, for no greater sins than pointing out the fact that Ken Wilber bumbles through every field to which he directs his astonishing inability to pay attention to detail, and documenting his converse penchant for making provably wrong “facts” up out of thin air.

As critics of the Ayn Rand cult—the former haunt of Wilber’s good friend, Nathaniel Branden—have noted, “when people identify too closely with their system of beliefs, they have no choice but defend them tooth and nail from any hint of cognitive dissonance.” That applies to integral beliefs and heroes just as surely as it does to Rand’s Objectivist ones. It applies to groups of skeptics and scientists, too, except that the proper application of the scientific method works to eventually sort fact from fiction, limiting the length of time through which one can fool oneself.

Never forget that when Max Planck spoke of new ideas in science being accepted not for any logic of persuasion but simply for the older generation dying out and being replaced by a new group who had grown up with the more-radical view of reality, he was not talking about religious believers being unable to think clearly. Rather, he was directing that observation toward the supposedly rational scientific community itself.

A group which could, through its relentless criticism, drive a Ludwig Boltzmann to suicide a century ago, for his support of the then-unaccepted atomic hypothesis, should be careful when looking askance at religious cults which treat questioners of their leaders no more humanely. (The same holds true for Oppenheimer’s dismissal of David Bohm’s great work as being “juvenile deviationism,” and his explicitly voiced attitude that “if we cannot disprove Bohm, then we must agree to ignore him” ... something which the global physics community did, quite successfully, for close to half a century, reacting “almost maniacally” to anyone who dared to take the idea of “hidden variables” seriously.) It is only the scientific method which separates such groups; the psychology and potential for cognitive dissonance and persecution of “unbelievers” is otherwise exactly the same.

In Wilber’s response to John Heron’s “not even wrong” (as Wolfgang Pauli would say, quite rightly) critique of his theories, he again pretended: “[O]ne study showed that, among individuals who meditated for several years, an astonishing 38 percent reached those higher stages.” If you can call eleven years merely “several,” then yes, 38 percent of the subjects in a study with ineptly designed protocols advanced to Loevinger’s highest stages in “several” years. Otherwise, no.

The astonishing thing there is that Wilber, in point #16 of that same response, actually references Michael Murphy’s The Physical and Psychological Effects of Meditation. So he knows very well—assuming that he has actually read that book, as opposed to having merely cited it without having read it—how meditation, far from being the “doorway to God,” can utterly screw up people’s lives. (KW is referencing that work, there, only for the “reams of actual evidence” it references in favor of meditation. At least Murphy, though no less credulous, is honest enough to present both sides, explicitly. Not so for Wilber.)

From the final, “Negative Experiences” section in Chapter 4 of that book:

Long-term meditators reported the following percentages of adverse effects: antisocial behavior, 13.5%; anxiety, 9.0%; confusion, 7.2%; depression, 8.1%; emotional stability, 4.5%; frustration, 9.0%; physical and mental tension, 8.1%; procrastination, 7.2%; restlessness, 9.0%; suspiciousness, 6.3%; tolerance of others, 4.5%; and withdrawal, 7.2%....

Ellis (1984) stated that meditation’s greatest danger was its common connection with spirituality and antiscience. He said that it might encourage some individuals to become even more obsessive-compulsive than they had been and to dwell in a ruminative manner on trivia or nonessentials. He also noted that some of his clients had gone into “dissociative semi-trance states and upset themselves considerably by meditating”....

Hassett (1978) reported that meditation can be harmful. Carrington (1977) observed that extensive meditation may induce symptoms that range in severity from insomnia to psychotic manifestations with hallucinatory behavior. Lazarus (1976) reported that psychiatric problems such as severe depression and schizophrenic breakdown may be precipitated by TM.... Glueck and Stroebel (1975) reported that two experimental subjects made independent suicide attempts in the first two days after beginning the TM program.

That, not claimed-but-utterly-unproven psychological stage-growth even over decades of practice, is what any group (integral or otherwise) that encourages you to meditate, for whatever reason, is really offering you. (Note: Personally, I have had nothing but good results from meditation. Other people have not been so fortunate.)

Of course, even Murphy, with his deep transpersonal and integral biases, can’t resist trying to put a positive spin on all that:

Though the rewards of contemplative practice can be great, they do not come easily.

So, if meditation is producing clinically psychotic behaviors in you, apparently you just have to “work harder” at it. (That is, of course, exactly the remedy which your teacher and peers will suggest. And to not go along with that bad advice is effectively to admit that you are not fit or ready for the “fast track to enlightenment.”)

Wilber has of course been referencing Piaget’s work since his (kw’s) early-’80s books The Atman Project and Up from Eden. Chapter 11 of his A Brief History of Everything further has this to say regarding Piaget’s concrete operational and formal operational stages:

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

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

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

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

Hold on to your hats: Wilber’s actually managed to get that almost right, believe it or not. Except that Piaget, in his own books, actually described using five jars of clear liquid—labeled “A” through “E”—not three! (Note, though, that kw did explicitly state that he was presenting a “simplified” version of the experiment—exactly what he failed to do with regard to his misrepresentations of basic evolution in the same book. If one takes that as being significant, it only makes it more likely that, in spite of his subsequent claims to the contrary, his misrepresentations of Darwinian evolution came precisely from failing to understand it even at a high-school level. That is, the pattern would make him more honest, but less competent.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still, “after twenty-five years [of kw’s published ‘expertise’], it’s nice to know.”

Wilber has recently waxed eloquent on the value of prayer, in his Kosmic Consciousness, CD 8 Track 9:

Interviewer: One other question about practice. What about praying, Ken? Do you think that prayer is by necessity a horizontal activity and not a vertical activity? Or could there be vertical forms of prayer?

KW: I think there are vertical forms, sure. And, well, most of the prayerful traditions are monotheistic or have a theistic dimension; generally, prayer is oriented towards a person, a higher person, but a person is a certain sense. And those traditions themselves make a difference between contemplative prayer and petitionary prayer. And petitionary prayer is, “I want the new car, I want the job, I want the....” What was the Janis Joplin, “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz”? That’s petitionary prayer big time. Nothing wrong with it, it’s just petitionary prayer—it’s “Here’s my ego, give me something.”

Contemplative prayer is, it can still be prayer, but it’s much more the opening, contemplative, meditative types of prayer. Prayer of the Heart, one of the most famous. But it’s just an opening, in that sense, and it still starts out, and it’s okay to start out, petitionary which is often you go to, it could be Mary, or Jesus, or any of the figures that you’re working with, it could be [unintelligible] for that matter, and you’re petitioning: “Please have mercy on me a sinner,” or “Please open my heart,” or “Please let me have more love.” But the way you hold it, and the way you open yourself, it’s a vast surrendering to this current of love and bliss and awareness that at first appears Other, but it soon enough appears as your own Self, your own deepest being, your own awareness and consciousness.

And that’s exactly what the really deepest parts of contemplative prayer do. And you can find in St. John of the Cross, and St. Theresa, and Hildegard, and Eckhart, you can find a complete path right up those seven levels to ever-present, all-inclusive awareness. Very, very profound paths. It’s just they’ve tended to be paths that didn’t get quite the emphasis that they got in the East for various reasons. They’re certainly present in those traditions. And Father Thomas Keating and others are of course revitalizing, actively revitalized the contemplative aspects of our Western traditions.

Interviewer: So it’s possible that prayer could move you up two levels in a similar way as meditation?

KW: Yes, I believe, I absolutely believe that. I believe that we’re going to find is that the original research on that meditation moving two stages was done by Skip Alexander with people who are doing Transcendental Meditation, and Transcendental Meditation done correctly is a very powerful form of meditation, and for what it does, I recommend it.

It has one advantage in that it’s such a lineage practice, so to speak, there’s a morphogenic field around it, if you will, it’s so well developed, that when people take up that practice, it has almost immediate effects. Other practices are harder to get into, they’re more sort of difficult. Zen is very difficult to do right; you have to practice it really for months, or even years, to really get into it. But TM, really within the first couple of sessions, you’re really kind of getting the hang of it. And because of that, it’s an ideal type of meditation for research, because there’s a similarity in people that practice it. There’s not that much variation, so you can actually learn something by looking at people who do it. And people who do it for a very long time get into some of these very profound states, including twenty-four-hour-a-day subtle constant consciousness that we talked about. And they’re the people who show this alpha-delta pattern when they sleep, suggestive of being awake through all great states.

It’s my belief, and I think that Skip Alexander and the others who have looked at this would agree, that what is happening in that meditation, the thing that is generic about it, that would be the same in any kind of meditation, including contemplative prayer, is just what we’ve been talking about—you strengthen the Witness. You’re looking at contents of the mind as an object and therefore you’re free of them. You are resting as the subject or the Witness, and as that continues, that’s what helps you move up the stages, because you [are] disidentifying with those as well, and therefore you’re moving through them more quickly.

And contemplative prayer, to the extent it does turn into contemplation, it moves out of its initial petitionary stance, and becomes open and contemplative the way Father Thomas teaches it, for example. It’s just that, you’re in this open, receptive, detached state, and it’s a state of witnessing, and to use the feminine side, it’s a state of loving. In this sense, everything that arises is loved equally, and that’s a different kind of practice. Mostly, love means “I love this, I don’t like that.” And also awareness usually means “I’m aware of this, I’m not aware of that.” So these higher states are “I have ever-present awareness that is aware of everything that is arising,” there’s simply that every-present awareness. And that higher love is “I love everything that’s arising. I have an equal touch and regard of everything that’s arising.” That’s what happens with the higher reaches of contemplative prayer, and I think, although the research hasn’t been done on this, I’m absolutely convinced they would show the same stage movement as the other types of meditation.

Would “contemplative prayer ... show the same stage-movement as the other types of meditation”? I’ll bet it would, keeping in mind that:

• The “research on meditation moving two stages” doesn’t actually exist, but is apparently rather just the product of Wilber ineptly conflating a number of different studies by Alexander, none of which were done with anything resembling proper protocols in the first place

• As far as doing TM “correctly”: Former accredited teachers of TM have been among its most vociferous critics. And, studies on TM which have been competently performed have shown no difference between the (relaxation) effects of TM versus a control. (The comparable properly controlled studies for purported stage-growth have, one safely assumes, not been done; if they had been, and had turned out the way that kw wants them to, he would be shouting that confirmation from the integral rooftops. Rather, Alexander’s work is the “best evidence” in favor of kw’s half-baked notions. And that “best evidence” has already been wholly discredited)

• The simultaneous existence of alpha and delta rhythms in the brain, even if that has been measured exactly as Wilber presents it (and knowing him and his penchant for exaggeration and pure fabrication, that’s a huge “if”) presents no parapsychological or transpersonal claim or proof. Rather, it can just as well be simply an untapped ability of the “purely physical” brain, with or without interior feelings having an ontological reality on top of that. Same thing for Witnessing consciousness in general: resting in That, with the internal feeling that one has “no boundaries,” doesn’t even remotely mean that one really is infinite in consciousness. (Comparably, subjective feelings of astral traveling do not mean that one really is doing that—i.e., doing it to the point of, say, being able to read a five-figure number off of a designated wall, which is how these things are easily and competently tested, and invariably found to not be what their imaginative proponents claim)

• Zen is many times more a “lineage practice” than is TM: Fifteen hundred years of lineage and practice, versus a few decades for any widespread practice of TM. (Obviously mantra yoga in general is much older. But it is Wilber who is focusing specifically on TM, here, and touting the benefits of its “lineage.”) And how is counting or watching one’s breaths in zazen more difficult to learn to do, and make progress with, than is internally chanting a mantra?

• Where are the properly controlled studies which show that long-term meditators are the ones who exhibit the “alpha-delta pattern”? Probably nowhere. More likely, that claim would turn out to be based on anecdotal testimony at best (including Wilber’s own portable-EEG observations regarding His Integral Self), and pure fabrication at worst

So yes, prayer is likely just as (in)effective as meditation; probably even a better option, as it doesn’t have the range of psychotic side-effects which meditation tends to have.

Corresponding to his unfounded belief in the efficacy of meditation in effecting psychological stage-growth, Wilber has equally touted the supposed existence of parapsychological phenomena. From page 433 of his “intentionally bad” novel, Boomeritis—originally written as a non-fiction work by kw—with the Jonathan character speaking:

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

“Even skeptics admit that it’s a real phenomenon”? Baloney! Skeptics do not regard the “Maharishi effect” as being a real phenomenon. Not even close. (Members of the Maharishi’s university, though, have given their own “detailed rebuttal” to that afore-linked skeptical critique of their “voodoo science.”) James Randi, in fact, had given a debunking of that purported effect as early as 1982, in his Flim-Flam!. Martin Gardner, likewise, in 1995 dismissed the Maharishi effect as being “supported, of course, by highly dubious statistics.”

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

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

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

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

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

So there is indeed an intermittent factual basis, in the above regards, for the idea that skeptics test and debunk only the weakest of the spiritual gene pool. (Although, when someone like the purported thought-photographer Ted Serios is quoted by Wilber’s credulous friend Michael Murphy—another founding member of the Integral Institute—as an example of the “strongest” evidence of parapsychological phenomena, they might as well all be among the “weakest.”) Far from being a fearful “avoidance” of the likes of Wilber and Brennan, however, that derives simply from the gap between the shirley-esque New Age of which skeptics are widely apprised, versus “serious,” wilber-esque spirituality. That the latter contains just as much self-dishonesty, deception of others, and inability to face reality among its practitioners as the former does, is both predictable and unavoidable.

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

“Sauce for the integral goose, sauce for the skeptical gander.”

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

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

Stumbling further into parapsychology, we find the following claims being made by Wilber in his (2001) CD, Speaking Of Everything:

KW: U.C. Irvine had been given, I don’t know, a $500,000 dollar grant or something to do another series of psychic research. So Roger [Walsh] was calling people saying, you know, what they really want to do is come up with the experiment that will just prove once and for all that psychic events happen. And they were trying to sort of have a little informal discussion about what should that experiment be. New ways to bend spoons, or make dice show up the right number of times. And I said basically that I think that was a misuse of money. Because the real problem is that we have meta-analysis on psychic phenomena....

E.com [i.e., Jordan Gruber, of enlightenment.com]: Yeah, Dean Radin’s book. It’s fabulous.

KW: That’s right. It puts it beyond dispute, and every statistician agrees. So I said take your $500,000 and buy a fucking PR firm.

E.com: Right.

KW: Because you people just have bad press. Another experiment is not going to change. It’s already one hundred percent certain.

One can, however, easily locate a statistical refutation of Radin’s analysis, by Ray Hyman and J. McCrone, at The Skeptic’s Dictionary. The conclusions which follow from it refer to exactly the same book which kw regards as being unassailable:

Based on the results of these experiments, Radin claims that “researchers have produced persuasive, consistent, replicated evidence that mental intention is associated with the behavior of ... physical systems” (Radin 1997: 144). That sounds like a hasty conclusion to me. He also claims that “the experimental results are not likely due to chance, selective reporting, poor experimental design, only a few individuals, or only a few experimenters” (Radin 1997: 144). He’s probably right except for the bit about it being unlikely that the experimental results are due to chance.

And note how, at that same skepdic link, all of the papers quoted to refute Radin’s 1987 meta-analysis claims were published prior to Dean’s own (1997) book. The idea that “informed skeptics” agree with his conclusions is thus completely false, to put it mildly.

(Radin’s work is surely a significant part of the “evidence” which kw thinks reductionistic views of reality cannot account for, and which he laughably believes supports the transpersonal aspects of his integral theory.)

Where, then, did Wilber get the confidently presented but brutally untenable idea that Radin’s (1997) work was actually valid, much less inarguably so? Why, from text in Radin’s own book, of course, as quoted on the enlightenment.com website:

“Informed opinion even among skeptics, shows that virtually all the past skeptical arguments against psi have dissolved in the face of overwhelming positive evidence,” and “informed skeptics today agree that chance is no longer a viable explanation for the result obtained in psi experiments.”

Note how the already indefensible “informed skeptics today agree” from Radin becomes the even worse “every statistician agrees” when processed through kw’s Swiss-cheese whiz-brain. (Presumably Radin was referring there to ostensible “skeptics” like the dupes at Skeptical Investigations ... including himself.)

Here is how one cogent reader of James Randi’s column suggested competently testing the Q-Link pendant which Wilber is likewise convinced (merely from his own imaginings) has real effects:

First, a volunteer not communicating with the tester takes ten Q-Link devices and ten dummy devices, which are identical, but have been disabled. The volunteer makes a list of numbers from 1 to 20 and randomly numbers the devices, keeping track of which is which. Now, someone else chooses any 10 of these 20 units and takes them to our friend Herbert. His job is to separate the good ones from the phonies. If what he claims is true, he should be able to use a subject (or ten separate ones) and determine, without fail, which are which. With ten units, he has a one-in-1024 probability of getting them all right by chance. And I’ll bet a case of premium tofu that he can’t do it!

On the other hand, Wilber’s standards of “proof” for the Q-Link go this way:

[T]he amount of scientific evidence on [the Q-Link] so far is small, but very, very promising. You’ve seen some of it on TV, and stuff.

Just how snuggly-wuggly is Wilber in bed with the makers of these new “technologies”? As he himself notes in Excerpt G from the forthcoming installment of his Kosmos trilogy:

Any good model open up lines of further research, and the integral or AQAL model is no exception. I have been developing many of these research agendas in conjunction with Bob Richards, co-founder of Clarus, Inc. [maker of the Q-Link] and a vice president of Integral Institute. We would be glad to discuss these issues with interested parties.

You will also find Richards’ name in the Integral Business section of the founding members of the Integral Institute, as the “head of the Integral Business branch.” (He is also on the Advisory Board for the Chopra Foundation, headed by Deepak Chopra.)

But let me put this in a more positive light. What this means is that it is much easier to transform when you are a young adult and when you are an old adult. There’s a type of U-curve here, with lots of transformation occurring earlier and later, but few in the middle years. Warren Bennis, who is a valued member of [Integral Center], refers to this phenomena as “geeks and geezers.” (Boomeritis, p. 393-4, with no supporting evidence provided even in the online Endnotes)

So the coming groups that will have a significant portion of their population at second tier are going to be aging boomers and the upcoming kids. What my friend Warren Bennis calls “geeks and geezers.” And those are the folks that make up I-I [i.e., the Integral Institute], although of course we will take anybody who is genuinely interested in second or third tier consciousness. (“Shambhala Interview with Ken Wilber”)

Here is a brief summary of the book Geeks and Geezers: How Era, Values, and Defining Moments Shape Leaders by Warren G. Bennis and Robert J. Thomas (Harvard Business School Press, 2002) from the publisher’s website:

Geeks and Geezers is a book that will forever change how we view not just leadership—but the very way we learn and ultimately live our lives. It presents for the first time a compelling new model that predicts who is likely to become—and remain—a leader, and why. Today’s young leaders grew up in the glow of television and computers; the leaders of their grandparents’ generation in the shadow of the Depression and World War II. In a groundbreaking study of these two disparate groups—affectionately labeled “geeks” and “geezers”—legendary leadership expert Warren Bennis and leadership consultant Robert Thomas set out to find out how era and values shape those who lead. What they discovered was something far more profound: the powerful process through which leaders of any era emerge. At the heart of this model are what the authors call “crucibles”—utterly transforming periods of testing from which one can emerge either hopelessly broken or powerfully emboldened to learn and to lead.

The book presents a new model of leadership that the authors formulated after interviewing twenty-five of today’s oldest leaders and eighteen of today’s youngest leaders:

• Geezers: age > 70, born ~1925, formative period 1945 – 1954 (Era of Limits)

• Geeks: age < 35, born ~1975, formative period 1991 – 2000 (Era of Options)

The leadership model, as the subtitle indicates, asserts that the historical era, the values of that era (not value memes!), and personal defining moments (called “crucibles”) shape leaders. Bennis and Thomas also identify adaptive capacity (“the ability to process new experiences, to find their meaning and to integrate them into one’s life”) as “the signature skill of leaders, and indeed, of anyone who finds ways to live fully and well.”

This book proposed a new model of leadership that is based on a cross-generational study. It provides absolutely no supporting evidence for kw’s claims that, for the average human being, there is a latency/dormancy period between ages twenty-five and fifty-five.

Of course, it is always possible that the real (or imaginary) Warren Bennis has had conversations with the real (and deluded) Ken Wilber, independent of the content of that book, and caved to the latter’s point of view with regard to psychological stage-growth transformations generally only happening in youth and past middle age. Indeed, Bennis could hardly openly disagree with The Shiny One on any major points of integral philosophy and still remain a member in good standing of the integral community. (As it stands, Bennis is actually yet another founding member of the Integral Institute.)

It is also completely possible that Wilber merely glanced at a title (“Geeks and Geezers”) and a subtitle (“How Era, Values [cf. value memes], and Defining Moments Shape Leaders”), “intuitively divined” that the book supports his own integral notions, and ran with it from there.

If the latter suggestion sounds unlikely to you, you have not yet properly appreciated just how much of Wilber’s life’s work is simply made up by him as he goes along—demonstrably pulled out of thin air, with no factual referent.

Either way, the book Geeks and Geezers has nothing to do with psychological stage-growth. If the real Bennis has used the phrase “geeks and geezers” in some other context where it actually supports Wilber’s conjectures, that is certainly not being advertised. And you’d think kw would advertise that point if it existed at all, wouldn’t you?

From assertions with no support, to “responses from critics” who are actually supporters: In Boomeritis, on page 244, kw has the Powell character state:

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

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

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

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

Granted, Boomeritis is purportedly a work of fiction—just as the rest of Wilber’s writings are ostensibly based in fact. So, technically, he is allowed (in the former) to make up whatever “facts” he likes, and present them as if they were real. Unfortunately, there no way for the reader to tell which of the claims in that novel are meant to be taken seriously. Worse, Wilber’s “real” research suffers from exactly the same “making it up out of thin air” penchant as does his “fiction.”

On page 396 of Boomeritis, Wilber has “Charles Morin” assert the following:

Studies [not cited by kw] show that yellow [meme, level seven] is approximately ten times more efficient than green [level six]....

[I]f 10% of the population is at yellow, it will very likely be at least as effective as 25% at green....

10% of elderly, wealthy, yellow Boomers will have at least the impact that the 25% of young green Boomers did....

If 10% of the population is at yellow, however, and if yellow is approximately ten times more efficient than green, then the 10% of the population at yellow would be approximately four times as effective, not merely at least as effective, as the 25% of the population at green (10 * 10%/25% = 4).

Further, if kw’s presumption that Y = 10G were correct, then the current 2% at Y would already be almost as effective as the 25% at G. Yet, in practice, G dominates the culture (especially in academia), and Y is hardly heard.

Thus, minimal comparison of Wilber’s grand “theories” against reality shows that things don’t work at all, in practice, the way he imagines they should! For, by his own testimony, it is the “greens” who hold far more sway over “politically correct” academia than the yellow-and-above, second-tier leaders such as himself. That position goes back at least to the early nineties, as kw indicates in the Preface to his Sex, Ecology, Spirituality. There, he relates that his attempted writing of a “textbook of psychology” was cramped by the fact that the words “development, hierarchy, transcendental [and] universal” were “no longer allowed in academic discourse,” owing to the “extreme postmodernism,” “pluralistic relativism,” and (green-meme) anti-hierarchy attitudes which had spread through academia. He hadn’t yet discovered Spiral Dynamics® at that point; if he had, he surely would have gotten a head start on his unfounded “Mean Green Meme” fixation, there.

Wilber sabotages himself so inadvertently, and so completely without awareness of what he’s doing, it’s actually scary.

Again: If 2% of the North American population is currently at yellow, and 20% to 25% (kw’s own numbers) is currently at green, and if yellow is “ten times more efficient” than green, then Y and G should be nearly of equal strength [20 vs. 20-to-25, from ballpark figures to begin with] right now, in terms of their influence on our culture. Yet, no one in his right mind would assert that they actually are, in practice, of equal influence today.

Of course, knowing Wilber and his transpersonal/integral ilk, when theory doesn’t match reality, it’s reality that has to go....

Music industry über-producer Rick Rubin, “the most important white boy in hip-hop,” guested on Wilber’s Integral Naked forum in early 2005. There, he and kw had the following conversation:

Ken Wilber: [The Beatles’] Rubber Soul and Revolver, those two albums were recorded in the same sessions.

Rick Rubin: Were they?

KW: Yeah.

RR: I didn’t know that.

KW: Yeah. It was for, like, this two-month, intense recording session. And then it was just sort of hacked down the middle in a sense, in terms of how they released them. And that’s why they’re so extraordinary, and they’re very, very different in some ways, but they’re very, very similar. You can really see that it was cut from the same cloth, so to speak. (“Beyond Genre, Part 2,” 9:59 – 10:26)

The first red flag there should be the fact that Rubber Soul was released in early December of 1965, while Revolver hit record store shelves on August 5, 1966, as the Beatles’ seventh album in three years. (The semi-compilation Yesterday And Today was released in between them. Revolver contained three songs—“I’m Only Sleeping,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and “Doctor Robert”—which had already appeared on the U.S. release of Yesterday And Today.) It would have made no sense at all for their money-focused record company, concerned that rock music was just a passing fad, to have left a full studio album from their top-selling group sitting “in the can” for eight months: people get fired for making managerial decisions of that level of stupidity.

And a “two-month, intense recording session”? Not quite. From Wikipedia:

Rubber Soul ... was recorded in just over four weeks to make the Christmas market.

More studio info, regarding Rubber Soul:

• “Nowhere Man” was “recorded on October 21 and 22” [of 1965] (Steve Turner, A Hard Day’s Write: The Stories Behind Every Beatles’ Song, p. 75). “In My Life” was recorded in the same month (Turner, p. 80)

And now, Revolver:

• “The first draft of John’s lyric for ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ [side one, song #3] was scratched on to the back of a letter from the Post Office, dated 25 March 1966” (Turner, p. 90). Late March was, of course, three and a half months after the release of Rubber Soul, making it rather unlikely that the Fab Four had recorded the (non-existent) song during the October 1965 sessions!

• “Paul wrote ‘Here, There And Everywhere’ [side one, song #5] in June 1966 while sitting by John’s outdoor pool” (Turner, p. 92)

• “‘For No One’ was written in a rented chalet in the Swiss ski report of Klosters, where Paul and Jane Asher spent a brief holiday in March 1966” (Turner, p. 97)

• “[T]he Beatles recorded Revolver in May 1966” (Turner, p. 96)

There’s a damn good reason, then, why Rubin, even as one of the upper echelon of music producers over the past two decades, had never heard that the songs for Rubber Soul and Revolver were recorded in the same sessions: They weren’t. Rather, the claim that they were is just another provable fabrication on the part of the “Pinocchio of consciousness research.”

No, you can’t.

Further consider: If the Beatles had actually recorded those two albums in the same sessions in 1965, why wouldn’t they have released it all as a double album? (Backing singers: “Why not, Ken?”) Why is it that the later album, Revolver, has the first, experimental use of backward tapes, on “Rain”? (Backing singers: “Why, Ken? Why? Oooh!”) The clues are all there for anyone who cares to think about it, even without doing any actual research.

Rubber Soul and Revolver, for all their brilliance, were not “cut from the same [studio sessions] cloth.” Not even close. If kw can “really see” that they were, that’s just another one (or more) of his integral hallucinations.

Further, as to Rubin’s own “integral” character, we learn from Stacy Gueraseva’s Def Jam, Inc.: Russell Simmons, Rick Rubin, and the Extraordinary Story of the World’s Most Influential Hip-Hop Label:

By his sophomore year, academics had already taken a backseat to Rubin’s real interest: music.... Although he missed most of his classes, Rubin still got passing grades. One of the ways he managed to do this way by paying other students, like Ric Menello, to write papers for him. (p. 8)

Rubin’s elaborate [dorm-room] sound system was a convenience when it came to deejaying Weinstein’s parties, but it was a major nuisance for a few of his neighbors. His upstairs neighbor Nancy liked to go to bed at around 11 p.m., which was when Rubin’s night usually got started. He and his friends would blast their music through the Cerwin-Vega speaker, waking up Nancy almost every night. When she would call Rubin and yell at him or bang on the floor, he only turned the music up louder. “This is what I do! This is my art,” he yelled back at her. “He really went out of his way to make her life miserable,” [fellow student Mike] Espindle recalled.

The conflict continued for months, and culminated one night in a near-fight. Rubin and his friends had just returned from a show amped and in the mood to party, so they sat around his room, laughing and listening to something really loud. Nancy started banging from above. Rubin increased the volume and, for added effect, started vacuuming the ceiling. Everyone was laughing hysterically, until suddenly the door blasted open, and there stood Nancy. “You motherfuckers!” she yelled, and ran into the room, wielding a small knife, according to Rubin. He made a quick getaway.

As a result of the incident, Rubin was threatened with being kicked out of the dorm. He appeared in the “Weinstein Court” to argue his case. “I am a punk rock musician, and volume is integral to the music,” he said in his defense. “To have punk rock without volume is to diminish its artistic value and merit. Therefore, volume is a necessary part of me doing my art.” He argued that when he listened to his music, he was studying, just as Nancy studied for her law classes. Rubin enlisted Menello to testify that he had heard few, if any, noise complaints about Rubin during his front-desk shift. “Someone has to have extrasensitive hearing like Superman to think it was too loud!” Menello proclaimed....

Rubin’s defense worked. He was allowed to stay in the dorm—under some strict regulations. “I was the first person brought up on charges in the fifteen or twenty years that they had a court,” Rubin remembered proudly. His upstairs neighbor Nancy moved soon after. (p. 10-1)

In the late ’80s, the people at Def Jam applied their collective skills to the world of film, in the movie Tougher Than Leather.

The critics panned it. “Vile, vicious, despicable, stupid, sexist, racist, and horrendously made” was one typical reaction.

The list of offensive content was long. There was Rubin’s generous use of the word nigger. “Never thought I’d die on account of a nigger,” his character, Vic, says during his death scene. The nudity and violence seemed gratuitous. (p. 150)

What I wanna know is this: How is it that someone who was so mono-perspectival at age nineteen as to maliciously disregard the completely reasonable needs (for quiet) of those living around him; who reportedly paid other students to do his academic work for him, and then had those interest-conflicted friends “tell the truth” on his behalf; and whose major-league directorial and acting debut led critics to vehemently dismiss his cinematic work as “stupid,” among numerous other much-worse epithets—how is it that someone like that can be on the receiving end of Wilber’s overreaching, fawning pontifications for the multi-perspectival, genre-busting “integral art” (of others, with RR as producer) which arises from exactly the same mindset?

Plus, here is kw’s take (in One Taste) on his own needs when he’s working:

The great romantic composers (Chopin, Mahler) are quintessential 4th chakra, all heart emotion, sometimes drippingly. Haydn, Bach, Mozart, later Beethoven, push into 5th to 6th, music of the spheres, or so it seems to me. You can actually feel your attention gravitate to various bodily centers (gut, heart, head) as these musical types play.

I find whenever I am writing about, say, Plotinus, Eckhart, or Emerson, the only music that doesn’t disturb thought is Mozart and the later Beethoven, some of Haydn. But when I’m doing the drudge work of bibliography, footnotes, etc., gimme rock and roll any day.

Good thing, then, that Rubin wasn’t in the same building when kw needed peace and quiet for his own work, and their respective “multi-perspectival” (ha!) needs conflicted, disturbing kw’s “deep thought” (ha!). “Trouble in integral paradise,” indeed. Too bad; they might otherwise have been quite compatible flatmates:

Rubin currently resides in the Hollywood Hills in an imposing estate whose grounds are populated with religious relics, shrines, and a library replete with books on Eastern mysticism, psychology, and Sufi poetry.

Let’s leave the last word on music to Ken Wilber, as he’s the (self-appointed) real expert:

[The Beatles’ Rubber Soul and Revolver] totally changed the way music was done, it was galvanizing what happened at that point. That’s when Paul McCartney and Brian Wilson were in their subtle body duel, which is really a quite extraordinary story. (“Beyond Genre, Part 2,” 10:28+)

No doubt it is, Ken. No doubt it is.

Let’s then leave the last word on reality to Rubin:

There’s nothing better than telling the truth. It’s really about falling in love.

Well, if telling the truth (in music or elsewhere) is like falling in love, then dealing with Wilber’s ideas must be at least as good as getting paid to jerk off a grubby stranger in a dark alley. (Rubin should know: One of his former girlfriends was an ex-porn star.)

As the South Park boys sing: “You don’t have to spend your life ... giving hand-jobs for cash.” You also don’t have to waste your time on Wilber’s or Rubin’s versions of “truth.”

It is no coincidence that by far the most damning critiques of Wilber’s ideas, and in particular the only critiques which take him to task for his utterly naïve parapsychological beliefs, have come from outside of the integral community. Everyone still inside the community, after all, is still trying desperately to salvage as much as they can of the integral perspective—and thus producing critiques which, even when valid in their own domain, have roughly the same degree of value elsewhere as would arguing passionately and rigorously over whether Hansel and Gretel left a trail of whole-wheat or of white breadcrumbs/heaps/holons on their way to the witch’s integral gingerbread house.

Recognizing the problems with Wilber’s bumbling work and nasty character is good, but it is only the first step. And until you are ready to go beyond that, there could be a hundred times as much debunking of Wilber’s ideas published, or of any other integral perspective, and it could all be done as sweetly and validly as you please, without a single insult. It would make no difference: you would still “believe,” all the moreso for having not a shred of real evidence to support the ontological reality of anything transpersonal in that “integral perspective.” (In trying to determine whether parapsychological phenomena exist or not, far more relevant than the fact that many skeptics would have difficulty accepting their existence is the reality that [i] people [e.g., Susan Blackmore, David Lane] who start off as “believers” but who keep questioning and demanding competently performed experiments for the testing of psi powers, even doing their own experiments, invariably end up as “radical agnostics” about the existence of those powers, and [ii] the high-paying challenges which have been offered by skeptics to claimed possessors of paranormal talents are invariably set up, with the input and agreement of the subjects being tested, so that their position on the subject and/or their reluctance to “believe” doesn’t matter.)

You may think that the greater belief in fairy tales even in the face of convincing evidence to the contrary is an exaggeration. But all you have to do is consider how many people think that homeopathy or the like work, based merely on their own anecdotal experiences, in spite of all the properly controlled studies demonstrating exactly the contrary. For, those personal experiences have no more scientific value than does Wilber’s imaginative endorsement of the Q-Link pendant.

And, as another bottom line: Given the many documented negative side-effects of meditation on people, it is unconscionable that Wilber or anyone else would blithely encourage people to meditate “for their spiritual growth.” That again applies to any perspectives, including integral ones, which encourage people to meditate, for whatever reasons, without fully warning them of the serious/psychotic risks to their own health.

As to competently performed studies on meditation which would support Wilber’s ideas on stage-growth: If they existed, he would be shouting their authors’ names from the integral rooftops. As it stands, he can’t even competently quote the protocol from the few cited studies which he wrongly thinks have proved that meditation advances people through stages of psychological growth. So good luck with finding better published studies which, realistically, don’t exist, much as they logically “could” exist.

Given the egregious, utterly amateur screw-ups involved in its construction, Wilber’s integral view of reality has demonstrated no more “brilliance” on the part of its creator than did Velikovsky’s electromagnetic theory of gravity, or his conjectures about how biblical miracles (e.g., manna falling from the sky) might have occurred by natural laws. When I say that Wilber is an idiot, I mean for that to be taken in exactly the same sense in which competent members of the scientific community might refer to Velikovsky as an idiot, quack or incompetent, completely out of his depth, but convinced that he himself is a “genius” and is making ground-breaking contributions to the field.

The idea that Wilber is the “Velikovsky of consciousness research” may be funny, but it is no joke. As Robert Carroll noted about Velikovsky, though: “That is not to say that his work is not an impressive exercise and demonstration of ingenuity and erudition [i.e., in imaginative “theorizing” and the taking of mere coincidences as if they indicated deep, underlying connections]. It is very impressive [though nonetheless hopelessly wrong], but it isn’t science. It isn’t even history.” (Re history: Compare kw’s [accurate!] use/quoting of Lorenz’s hopelessly outdated and misled ideas on human vs. animal aggression, even to the present day. That, too, is “not even history.”) Less charitably, Velikovsky’s former associate Leroy Ellenberger observed: “The less one knows about science, the more plausible Velikovsky’s scenario appears.” And Michael Friedlander: “I would not trust any alleged citation by Velikovsky without checking the original printed sources.” Or this: “Velikovsky interprets, adds, and deletes liberally while insisting he is adhering literally to the evidence.... Given such an array of data and freedom to interpret, the legends can be made to fit any theory.” Or this: “[W]hen a book contains obvious incompetencies that can be spotted just at random, you don’t need to read the whole thing to conclude it’s junk.” Or this: “[T]he New York literary world considered Velikovsky a genius on par with ‘Einstein, Newton, Darwin and Freud.’” Or, finally, this: “[T]here can be no denying the scientific indifference and incompetence of Velikovsky.” Do those critiques remind you of anyone else’s work?

If it looks like an integral quack, and theorizes like an integral quack ... it’s Duck à la Wilber.

But Velikovsky [Wilber] makes it all look so consistent. Surely he couldn’t put all those legends together so neatly unless his theory was true? Variations on this theme come up with just about every type of pseudoscience. The startling truth is that theories that hang together pretty well logically and are reasonably consistent with most of the evidence are a dime a dozen in science. It’s easy—anyone can construct one. The key to the problem lies in the qualifiers “pretty well,” “reasonably consistent ,” and “most of the evidence.” The difference between a mediocre theory and a good one is that the good theory is as nearly as possible entirely consistent with all the evidence. You can make any theory look good if you are free to disregard or rearrange key bits of evidence. (Steven Dutch)

Wilber has, of course, traded on that fact for his entire career. And, if you ask me, the non-Wilberian “integral” alternatives out there are no better, having just as much of a “selective fantasy” component to them, and no more ability or willingness on the part of their authors to distinguish fact from probable fiction by established, simple (scientific) methods designed to prevent people from fooling themselves. If by “the integral perspective is here to stay” one means simply that future philosophies will try to incorporate the moments of truth from each of their predecessors and component perspectives, I am all for that. It is the “fantasy” aspects of all that, though, that will either somebody be proved to exist in independently replicated, competent testing (which neither kw nor Skip Alexander would, it seems, recognize if it bit them on the nose), or die a well-deserved death, and thus certainly not be “here to stay” in any good or rational way.

Even outside of that consideration, the huge differences between, say, Wilber’s hierarchical kosmos versus the peer-to-peer alternative(s) are the product of no mere “fine tuning” of Wilber’s Four Quadrants. How do you plan on deciding which one is right(er)? or, at least, discerning which one is less wrong? When you have alternative integral approaches being put together by people who are as convinced that homeopathy works as kw is certain that the effects of the Q-Link pendant are real, and other people making important contributions to those alternatives only after having demonstrated their own lack of understanding of Wilber’s ideas in attempted critiques of his work, you are just setting yourself up for another series of disappointments.

When you have to screw up or grossly oversimplify basic, high-school-level ideas, from neo-Darwinian evolution to Spiral Dynamics to Piaget, in order to make your ideas “fit,” as kw does, that is not “brilliant,” except perhaps brilliantly stupid. (If you disagree, and continue to regard Wilber as a “brilliant” individual in spite of his documented bumblings, do the same for Velikovsky. And then be prepared to explain how someone can be simultaneously brilliant and incompetent in the same subject. Velikovsky’s fertile imagination and few, coincidental “hits” in predicting that the planet Venus would be hot, etc., in no way made him a brilliant individual—though his daft followers would certainly disagree. The same applies to Wilber and his imaginative theories, which have predicted even less.)

As noted above, anyone should be able to create “impressive syntheses” of existing knowledge if they are allowed to twist (or selectively ignore), in whatever way they want, the facts they’re purporting to include! That is one reason, among many, why it is so important to get your basic facts straight, through competent experimentation or at least the ability to recognize the lack of validity in the experiments done by others (e.g., Skip Alexander), before you start theorizing (“integrally” or otherwise), not after.

Ken Wilber, one of the most important contemporary integral thinkers, begins by acknowledging and validating mystical experience, rather than denying its reality. As these experiences have occurred to humans in all cultures in all eras, they are accepted as valuable and not pathological. (Wikipedia, “Integral theory (philosophy)” entry)

That, of course, is exactly my point. That’s where he begins, and that is where he will end, regardless of the evidence or the obvious influence of group bias in the “meditative data” coming from those past and current cultures. And peer-to-peer “participative spirituality” is going to be any more vetted or valid? Not a chance. Much as their theorists may object to hierarchies, in spiritual communities and otherwise, they have no more objection to parapsychological fairy tales, and no more willingness to competently test claims (e.g., of visible auras and astral travel) which are easily testable, to determine whether their phenomena are real or not, than does Wilber himself. (John Heron is one of the “P2P pioneers.” His A Way Out for Wilberians is, in his own words, “not a defense against the call to spiritual self-transfiguration. I am committed to and engaged with that call.” And so he suggests a process whereby “individuals agree on a methodology of inquiry, then compare their experiences, adapting their inquiry to their findings, etc.” That is a small step up from Wilber’s inadequate ideas on the topic of “scientific mysticism,” but still would do absolutely nothing to show that what the subjects were experiencing was real.)

Q-Links and hierarchy, or homeopathy and peer-to-peer; Hansel and Gretel, or Peter and the Wolf. Choose whichever bedtime story you prefer. Just don’t be surprised when you wake up screaming from the nightmares. And if you just keep thinking and researching outside of the integral field, one day you will wake up from believing their fairy tales.

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