markmac
21-05-2007, 02:09 PM
Hello,
Thanks for posting.
I'm at work at the moment so I haven't a lot of time to write a detailed response, but I've copy and pasted an email below which I originally sent to my mate (who introduced me to Ken Wilber and Integral) about my reservations regarding Integral/AQAL.
At that particular point it was 1am and I had only been looking around for 3hrs so I obviously hadn't found out much about the AQAL model at that point (I've obviously found more information on it since then, and then came across the DVD I mentioned).
But as redundant as my concerns were(at the time)/are(possibly still) the email went as follows:
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Okey dokey, I've just spent a few hours going over this and really only making a tiny headway in my research of the Integral Institute (and Ken Wilber) and so far it has to be said that to try and get to *any* kind of real information regarding "Integral" I've had to read through a hell of a lot of verbose "sales talk" about the Integral ideology without ever really getting an "explanation" of what it is and what its actual concepts are? I mean this isn't me not understanding the concepts, rather the authors of these articles apparent love to talk about how great Integral is without ever offering any substance.
I found the following review of some of Wilber's writing....
Here is a one sentence sample of Wilber's writing at it's worst: "So we have some very popular theorists who, tired of the burdens of postconventional and world-centric rational perspectivism, recommend a regressive slide into egocentric vital impulsive polymorphous phantasmic emotional revival." Like Hegel, Wilber has attracted legions of readers who assume that his most incomprehensible writing must be his most brilliant.
Not to say I didn't eventually find some information about Integral (with a strong intent to research this subject fully as it seems there is a lot of grey area that needs to be looked into).
So far I have managed to get hold of information from the Integral Institute website (main they tried hard to hide it! I had to work like a bitch to find the link to this particular document I've referred to) which attempts to explain what the system of Integral is - and so far I have found it basically to be a process of amalgamating different philosophies and "opinions of truth" without [apparently] delving into eclecticism.
I then checked around and found that some principles of the Integral system seemed suspciously similar to Nondualism(Nondualism may be viewed as the belief that dualism or dichotomy are illusory phenomena)/Idealism (only minds and the objects of mind exist, and everything is composed of mental realities). But thinking about it, I guess that's the whole point of Integral's process of "Generalization", lol.
They talk about how Ken Wilber uses "generalization" to tie together the information across different sectors and they make this sound like its the most amazing thing ever? But think about it, of course if you generalize enough, and go up the levels high enough then of course you'll be able to find ties between different subjects because there will be nothing left to differentiate them from each other - at this point in time I don't see what is so incredible about this method of "connecting the dots".
I've decided to purchase the book "A Brief History of Everything" which apparently is more fullfilling and easy to grasp than his other works (such as "A Theory of Everything" - which according to most people is lacking in substance and relevance).
At this point I ventured onto Amazon to have a look at some other Ken Wilber books - as well as to see what the reviews were like for "A Brief History of Everything" (as I had heard it was the best book for understanding the Integral system - from people who were clearly biased towards Ken Wilber's work - so I needed to see if there were any objections to his books before commiting to any particular purchase - which subsequently I have done now by purchasing "A Brief History of Everything").
On Amazon alone I came across a vast amount of criticism against Ken Wilber. Some of which I've listed below as you may be interested to read them.
I'm going to continue researching this subject until I have a strong understanding of it and look forward to the book arriving as I think it will better help me get to grips with what Ken Wilber is trying to get across.
This email may sound negative towards Ken Wilber and the Integral Institute but it's not meant to be - as I'm not "writing off" the Integral system just yet. I'm sure there is substance in this area and am keen to find it out to help further my own spritual evolution/consciousness, but I would strongly advise you read through some of the comments below with a *clear* mind - as the majority of these comments do make valid arguments which need to be objectively considered before the Integral system or Ken Wilber can be claimed to be flawless as you feel they are (so far).
Obviously I can only judge these comments at face value (as they may turn out to be either mis-information, or the excerpts they reference may be taken out of context), so at this stage I really need to read through one of his books first before I can make a solid judgement on his work.
Comments on Ken Wilber and Integral:
For an audience made up of new age environmentalist pseudo intellectuals, I'm sure this succeeds on all levels. In it's best light, this work could be considered a form of literary criticism, or a conceptual piece on the philosopy and psychology of spiritual development. But for people with some knowledge of true science, or maybe just a normal sized b.s. detector, they will find at least a few flaws in an otherwise interesting package.
Wilber's fame apparently comes from attempting to put the stamp of science on the panoply of spiritual thought and development through a slavish devotion to categorization and comparison. I was reminded more than once of Emerson's saying that "foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." The amount of categorization at times became amusing to me as he seemed to blindly put square pegs into round holes, just to get categories to line up.
Wilber comes across as a sharp, well read and mostly entertaining guy, albeit a bit too sure of himself and his ideas. He attempts to wipe all things spiritual with the patina of science, treating myth as hard fact, playing fast and loose with what little science there is, and occasionally throwing in some mild but apparently playful skepticism when the research is critically lacking. As he does with the lack of evidence for reincarnation, which he later makes clear that he absolutely believes in. Frankly, he seems to believe as fact anything anyone has ever written about in the area of spirituality. I certainly believe that people have had some amazing experiences in their brains, but to believe that every bizarre inner experience anyone has ever had reflects a concrete, external, measurable reality is crazy, or at best a form of wishful thinking to support one's faith.
Nonetheless, I should emphasize, a stimulating listen. [Reading this whole review later, I feel maybe I was a little hard on the guy. I'm not changing it, but just consider it as balance to the large number of glowing reviews.]
Consider Wilber's concept of the essential modules of integral practice: physical, cognitive, psychodynamic and meditative. First, we're given a hypothetical integral practitioner named Jackie, who takes a daily multivitamin, rides her bike to work, does power yoga, visits a massage therapist, studies the AQAL model, keeps a dream journal and meditates. Can someone please differentiate Jackie from your average nice, socially-conscious, single, self-absorbed San Franciscan, elbow-deep in the descended grid, for me? If Jackie's lucky, she can meet most of these needs at her local health club/spa, then pedal to the ferry building for organic take-out, so maybe Integral Institute should open a line of wellness centers.
My main point is that Wilber is advocating the balanced life, and I'm all for that, as some cultures maintain balance as the essential mark of the cultivated or scholarly life; perhaps only in America would we be so atomized that we need "cross-training" spelled out. At the same time, intrinsically integral "peak" experiences-those that potentially fuse mind-body-spirit and dispel ascending or descending impulses-such as childbirth should not be discounted within a larger framework of integrated life experience, and I think an important distinction should be made between, say, smoking pot, and conscious childbirth.
How many times and how many minds have written.. to be enlightened is to discharge the ego. ? So, why then the need to prove anything to me? My opinion matters not to the enlightened one. Yet in this writing the need to validate for the intellectual community is most apparent, ad nauseum. All the 'name-dropping' all the references simply testify to the intellectuals' need for approval. Some say it wasn't enough, not enough proof. Well, I have a theorem..if you are convinced it is because you have true experience, thus your conviction will show through in your work and others will experience it. There is nothing more convincing than what life teaches. I find books that speak from the soul carry far more depth..you can read hundreds of books, and write of your ideas henceforth, but tell me what has your life experience taught you. All authors want their readers to gain something from their writing. I personally gain nothing from having my intellectual ego stroked.
My experience in reading this book was a conviction inappropriately dressed in intellectual urea.
Why do I say this? Well, this book is 339 pages and I had a harder time with this book than I did the entire 'Urantia Book'.., 2097 pages covering far more science, philosophy, religion, spirituality, logic, and reason.
Enough of books written from the minds of people who do nothing more than read. What about the idea of a philosophy that we can apply to real life. If Ken Wilber is THE new philosophy, than his art should ring in ones soul like the music of the Beatles - music that transcends and includes. Transcending the older generation of music lovers yet including them.
This book transcends alright. It transcends a basic level of intellegence - so it may speak to the scholarly, but it fails to include. I feel this book IS worthy of attention. I think the ideas could have been expressed to include the wider audience it transcends, and at the same time reduced to about 120 pages.
How many times and how many minds have written.. to be enlightened is to discharge the ego. ? So, why then the need to prove anything to me? My opinion matters not to the enlightened one. Yet in this writing the need to validate for the intellectual community is most apparent, ad nauseum. All the 'name-dropping' all the references simply testify to the intellectuals' need for approval. Some say it wasn't enough, not enough proof. Well, I have a theorem..if you are convinced it is because you have true experience, thus your conviction will show through in your work and others will experience it. There is nothing more convincing than what life teaches. I find books that speak from the soul carry far more depth..you can read hundreds of books, and write of your ideas henceforth, but tell me what has your life experience taught you. All authors want their readers to gain something from their writing. I personally gain nothing from having my intellectual ego stroked.
My experience in reading this book was a conviction inappropriately dressed in intellectual urea.
Why do I say this? Well, this book is 339 pages and I had a harder time with this book than I did the entire 'Urantia Book'.., 2097 pages covering far more science, philosophy, religion, spirituality, logic, and reason.
Enough of books written from the minds of people who do nothing more than read. What about the idea of a philosophy that we can apply to real life. If Ken Wilber is THE new philosophy, than his art should ring in ones soul like the music of the Beatles - music that transcends and includes. Transcending the older generation of music lovers yet including them.
This book transcends alright. It transcends a basic level of intellegence - so it may speak to the scholarly, but it fails to include. I feel this book IS worthy of attention. I think the ideas could have been expressed to include the wider audience it transcends, and at the same time reduced to about 120 pages.
For those who don't know (it seems likely based on these reviews that many don't), this is the same Ken Wilber who, not so long ago, was zealously promoting the works of the meglomaniacal cult leader Da Free John, a man who makes the usual claims for his type: to be the greatest avatar of all time, in possession of miraculous powers, and so on. Many of Wilber's ideas, here in Brief History of Everything and all of his later works, are lifted directly from "Master" Da, right down to the terminology, but he hardly stops there: he simultaneously manages to believe in literal Hindu-style reincarnation, Freudianism, Zen Buddhism, behaviourism, and any number of other things, dodging their inherent contradictions by taking only what he wants of each.
His system is little more than a lot of decoration disguising a stitching-together of Freud and Piaget with Da and Aurobindo; correspondences to what he here and in later works calls "other quadrants" are always suggested but never specified. Similarly, his supposedly "inclusive" model simply ignores vast areas of the world religious traditions that contradict his theory, such as all of Western esotericism and the nearly universal idea that the proper number of levels of consciousness (his primary theme) is seven.
That the seams in this crazy quilt are seemingly invisible to so many is due in part to the overspecialized (mis)education we are provided with; most of Wilber's readers probably aren't familiar enough with the vast territories he covers to realize that he subtly distorts all he touches to shoehorn it into his model. He comes across here and elsewhere as a self-assured filing cabinet stuffed full of data; but he never provides us with a single testable hypothesis, only a belief system consisting of a vague doctrine of inevitable progress. It is this in particular that makes his system so appealing to the academics, corporate CEOs and limosine new-agers that endorse it; it reinforces all their most cherished illusions. This is not to say that his books are without merit; his observations are spot-on when he isn't defending his precious system, and he builds a sort of holistic verbal bridge to places the intellectually or spiritually lazy will find new, but for those serious about transformation it is a bridge to nowhere.
He not only misses the whole family issue, but also giving back to your community or having a communtiy in general. Your review is helpful for me, a 30 something and childless. I am very impressed by his web site and marketing abilites, when I dig deeper, he is really saying what other gurus say, he just packages it in a more savey manner.
HILARIOUS: Is there an intellectual sounding way to say nothing? Wilber has found it.
My one major objection to his theories is that he is apparently unaware how his own cultural bias shapes his thoughts. The division of everything into four quadrants (one/many and subjective/objective) is a Western division. It is by no means universal. These quadrants are so fundamental to his reasoning that what he claims to be a universal theory of everything is little more than the millionth Western view of reality. To the extent that he integrates diverse worldviews, he all makes them fit within his own biased scheme.
Secondly, he talks about 'higher' forms of consciousness as if he knows them like his back pocket. He sees the 'non-dualistic' as the highest form of consciousness. This is clearly speculative and not based on any facts. One would think that in this day and age, transcending the 'us vs. them' duality would be the next step. This duality lies at the core of almost every conflict we see today. If Wilber was right, peace would be a very long way off.
I have heard some people say in an admiring tone how they 'were trying to understand Wilber' as if he was the greatest genius that ever lived. Genius shows itself in simplicity. Sometimes, when someone is hard to understand, it is simply because they aren't making much sense. Ken Wilber is a perfect example.
This is indeed petty (yet interesting when you consider a valid point by the reviewer about how accurate Ken Wilber actually is within his analysis):
This is going to sound petty to most, but it hit me really hard.
I saw this book in a store and, having heard a lot about Ken Wilber, I picked it up. Of course, I turned right away to the "Note to the Reader" in front. Within seconds I was gasping in disbelief. Here's why.
Wilber begins with one of my favorite books, Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Great, I thought, a fellow Hitchhiker's fan! But, he immediately gets it wrong, seriously wrong, several times.
I quote:
"In Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a massive supercomputer is designed to give the ultimate answer, the absolute answer, the answer that would completely explain 'God, life, the universe, and everything.'"
Wrong. It's "Life, the Universe, and Everything". No mention of God. Wilber continues:
"But the computer takes seven and a half million years to do this, and by the time the computer delivers the answer, everybody has forgotten the question."
Also wrong. They never knew the question in the first place, and never realized they would have to know the question in order to understand the answer. Wilber goes on:
"Nobody remembers the ultimate question, but the ultimate answer the computer comes up with is: 42. This is amazing! Finally, the ultimate answer. So wonderful is the answer that a contest is held to see if anybody can come up with the question."
Utterly, utterly wrong. There was no "contest"; a second computer was built to find the Ultimate Question. This computer was so large it was frequently mistaken for a planet, and was called the Earth by its inhabitants. Onward:
"Many profound questions are offered, but the final winner is: How many roads must a man walk down?"
Again, wrong. The Earth was destroyed five minutes before it was due to complete its program, and those who had built it decided to come up with a fake question rather than go through the whole thing again. "How many roads must a man walk down?" was what they settled on.
So, that's four major mistakes in the first two paragraphs, about a book that's known and loved by many, many readers. If Wilber can't be bothered to get this right, then (I asked myself) how trustworthy could he be on a more serious subject such as "a brief history of everything"?
I put the book down and walked away.
I had read a couple of Wilber's earlier books and liked them, especially the superb "Grace and Grit." At his best, he can be very good at explaining a nondualistic Eastern style philosophy.
Here is a one sentence sample, from the book, of Wilber's writing at it's worst: "So we have some very popular theorists who, tired of the burdens of postconventional and world-centric rational perspectivism, recommend a regressive slide into egocentric vital impulsive polymorphous phantasmic emotional revival." Like Hegel, Wilber has attracted legions of readers who assume that his most incomprehensible writing must be his most brilliant. If you are willing to make that assumption, this book will delight you.
When he talks about stuff I know he is so far off, misconstruing and mistating, that it makes me doubt his discussion of areas I know less about. This is basically untestable philosophy, which you may like of not. But it is way far from new, as any of us old 60s folks can recall. To paraphrase an old article in psychology: what's true isn't new, and what's new isn't true. Read some neuropsych instead.
Too many words for a simple message: basically Wilber's philosophy is: there are people out there who are stuck in their cultural conceptions. In other words, some people are closed minded. Some people need to open their minds to other's views and allow themselves to grow a little. This confirms Wilbur's own admission as to why he really is not accepted in academia: he is not really saying anything of substance. Not only has he admitted this but he followed it up with saying that's why he took his message to the people. Of course, the average joe will eat this stuff up as though it is a step toward enlightenment. Dont bother with this guy...he seems too full of himself.
Too many words for a simple message: basically Wilber's philosophy is: there are people out there who are stuck in their cultural conceptions. In other words, some people are closed minded. Some people need to open their minds to other's views and allow themselves to grow a little. This confirms Wilbur's own admission as to why he really is not accepted in academia: he is not really saying anything of substance. Not only has he admitted this but he followed it up with saying that's why he took his message to the people. Of course, the average joe will eat this stuff up as though it is a step toward enlightenment. Dont bother with this guy...he seems too full of himself.
My first exposure to Ken Wilber was his Brief History of Everything, a book of incredible depth and scope, so I was disappointed when reading History of Everything to come across to glaring errors the first time I sat down with it. The first was his claim that only living things reproduce themselves. This is simply wrong; crystals, for instance, reproduce under the right conditions, and a proper mineral solution may be "seeded" with the crystal that one intends to grow. The second incorrect claim he made was that natural selection is not a strong enough force to explain the evolution of life on earth, in particular that is insufficient to explain the jump from Earth's early "primordial soup" to the earliest forms of life. For those who insist that Wilber is correct in this claim, I reccomend the works of Richard Dawson, a brilliant evolutionary biologist.
What I want to address, though, is Brother Ken's apparent need to develop his compassion, which seems stunted by comparison to his intellect. I just found a statement of Ken's on the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, which he posted to his website in 2003 (it can be found on the Shambhala Publications site), and which he apparently thinks highly enough of to have left there until now. In it, Ken lashes out at the peace movement in a way betraying a lack of elementary decency and respect. His proposal, which is supposed to reflect his superior "second-tier" insight, is a world government (MARK: world government is bad! my own opinion obviously) , which is something I've seen the need for since I was about 13. I don't think it took "second-tier" consciousness to figure it out. Does Ken think most peace activists haven't also thought of that? But what do we do without one when imperialist powers like the U.S. invade and occupy countries? He places the peace movement and the neocon advocates of war on the same primitive moral plane, far beneath his lofty position, but based on his tirade I think it's clear who needs some intensive ethical development. Certainly developing "compassion for all sentient beings" would be a prerequisite to Brother Ken becoming any sort of philosopher-king with policy-making authority.
"The standard, glib, neo-Darwinian explanation of natural selection -- absolutely nobody believes this anymore...Take the standard notion that wings simply evolved from forelegs. It takes perhaps a hundred mutations to produce a functional wing from a leg -- a half-wing will not do. A half-wing is no good as a leg and no good as a wing -- you can't run and you can't fly. It has no adaptive value whatsoever. In other words, with a half-wing you are dinner."
Has he tried telling that to the hundreds of species that use webbing between fingers and toes to glide? The reptilian ancestors of modern birds that had no feathers, and instead used skin stretched in between arms and body to move air? The book is good, but this type of shoddy pseudo-science just makes it another self-help book for those looking for easy answers, without having to exercise their critial reasoning. And making a claim that no one believes the glib neo-Darwinian explanation means that there is no neo-Darwinian explanation, because there's no one to make that explanation! Oops. Nice try, but I'll stick with more meaty matter.
When mentioning the Axial Age with its saints and prophets, Wilber studiously omits every name connected with the Judeo-Christian tradition. One feels an agenda, but it is never stated explicitly. Sneaky.
i.) With all due respect, Wilber is quite innocent re science, especially physics. His references ( for instance, on Pythagoras' theorem, but also his musings on Quantum Mechanics in other books ) could only put off a professional physicist or a mathematician as an amateurish dabblings of a presumptuous ignoramus ( the contempt Gauss had harbored for Hegel's philosophizing of mathematics springs to mind immediately ).
ii.) Wilber's central worldview is the non-dualist vision of Reality ( essentially, it is Ch'an/Zen, Tibetan Mahamudra or Trika Shaivism refurbished ), combined with Hegel's evolving Spirit. Yet, the two are hardly reconcilable. You either got: a) the manifest Reality as Illusion ( Advaita Vedanta, Zen,..) which doesn't warrant "perfection" or "evolution". The world just *is*, without any mythological, let alone rational, explanation or answer to the Leibniz's ultimate question " Why is there anything, instead of nothing ?" b) the manifest Reality as actualization of potential, "hidden" state of the Absolute, radiating/emanating into evolving & ever perfecting forms ( a tad optimistic view on evolution ). In sum, the manifest ( in various levels of manifestation ) Kosmos serves the purpose of enriching & "glorifying" the omnipresent Spirit ( Erigena, Hegel, also Meher Baba in his wilder speculations ). An important subvariant ( Rumi, Neotheosophy ) claims that not only Spirit evolves, but essential human souls ( ruh, pneuma, jivatman ) who are the chief protagonists of "evolutionary enterprise".) Therefore, I would say that marriage of Shankara's Advaita and Hegel's objective idealism is doomed from the outset.
iii). All this inflated verbal jazz is not the substitute for genuine originality. I haven't found true creative spirit & seminal ideas, just the old wine in new ( bells and whistles ) bottles.
iv.) The last verdict: Wilber's predisposition for non-dual visions of Reality in the vein of Advaita Vedanta or Zen blinds him to the richness and profundity of, also "spiritual", but more nuanced and "diversified" doctrines a la Hermetic, Rosicrucian, Lurianic Kabbalistic or more "digestable" contemporary revelations like Seth or truly radical & practical, but lucid and all-encompassing transpersonal psychologies like Assagioli's psychosynthesis. Marriage of East & West turned out to be no more than a dissemination of distilled & modernized corpus of intelectually elitist, but esentially marginal non-dual spiritual doctrines of East and Southeast Asia.
He seeks out a lot of important ground and introduces you to it in his own evangelistic way, inextricably mixing in his many confusions. The innocent who reads this book first will probably struggle to unlearn it for decades.
Wilber is one of the leading pantheistic (or nondual) thinkers of the day. His ability to synthesize vast amounts of material is impressive, as is his literary output. However, his fundamental world view is philosophically inconistent and denies things sane people take to be true. His philosophy of nondualism (or monism) logically entails the elimination of the duality of good and evil. In some places Wilber admits this; in others he assumes the ontologically reality of good and evil. This is contradictory, and therefore, false. There is a thick contradiction at the heart of his worldview. No amount of meditation can dissolve that.
On page 219 we find this: "If you take somebody from the magic or mythic worldview, and you try to explain to them that the sum of the squares of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the hypotenuse, you won't get very far." Well, of course not, because you will not be making any sense at all! Did the author mean to state the Pythagorean Theorem: the square of the hypotenuse in a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides? This is a completely different idea, but we must assume this is what he was trying to say. But it gets worse! Mr. Wilber wants us to believe that the results and conclusions of the meditative traditions ( "you are face to face with the Divine . . .") are exactly the same kind of knowledge as the Pythagorean Theorem!!!!! Have your seventh-grade child demonstrate--in the real, physical, "empirical" world--the truth of the Theorem of Pythagoras and then ask yourself if you believe Wilber is correct here.
bigus_dickus
22-05-2007, 02:26 PM
some of the above comments are spot on!
wilber really says nothing at all.. but he also admits it. and his integral model, i don't think i know how this could be applied. it's a good model for description, but applying that to life, i think it is a no-no! humans don't like to work like that, like robots, humans want to deal with real stuff and reality, we are not computers.
computers don't wanna have fun and enjoy.. or the opposite.
and of course he does nothing new by finding the common ground in philosophies and religions, any simple mind, like mine for example can and has already done that. but i didn't waste hundreds of hours to write that bs down and intellectualize it so much that no one understands it at the end, not even me.
because, in the end, there's nothing even there to understand. all that is, is already there, everything new or old, or ancient, or futuristic.. everything already exists. i didn't come here to life, to understand the mechanics of the universe and to integrate them to me, so i can become someone. i already am someone! and the purpose is the journey of life, the experience, not to be a leader or a slave. we can be both and we are both in life, lets not delude ourselves.
and andrew cohen.. i find these guys entertaining to listen to, especially while playing games on the pc, but i don't think there's really anything useful there to learn from them. it could all come down to this: "the 'verse, all that is, is a reflection of the self". not to mention that the self is a mere nothingness..
right... pass the joint now. i mean, nothing new there, so what, what do we do now?
why can't they lay it down simple: love is life, life is love. love to live, live to love.
you don't want that, then fuck you.
that's my philosophy.. :)