Norman Einstein

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Michael

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[Daniel]

Michael said:

I sure hope the future of humanity doesn?t need cult leaders like...KennyBaby in order to survive?

So where do you stand with Wilber? Cult leader? Brilliant? To what extent? Is he right? 50% of the time? 70% of the time 90% of the time? 100% of the time? How much bullshit is mixed in with his Integral "truths"? How much shadow and bullshit comes from KW? How does it blend in with our bullshit and shadow? Are we being lead down the primrose path, bamboozled? Is Big Mind applicable here? What does the skeptic say?

http://www.normaneinsteinbook.com/

[Michael]

Well to me it comes down to a question of taste really.  When I look at the man's work in terms of "is it good?"  "Is it true?" and "is it beautiful?" It seems good in lots of ways...very useful for a lot of people apparently, it sure has been useful to me...is it good for the world in general?  Yes as long as it doesn't get too wrapped up in its own ideological self-importance.  And in my estimation that's exactly what's happening.

Is it true?  Again yes and no.  The "pure" theory of KW seems very true to me by and large.  And the way that theory is used. both internally and externally, by I-I sanctioned people, and critics alike, diminishes the truth value considerably.

Is it beautiful?  Yes in a purely abstract way, devoid of actual realworld situations outside of cloistered walls, it has a very appealing elegance and symmetry.

But it fails most miserably on the aesthetic level for me personally, because it's simply not to my taste anymore.  I love a lot of bits and pieces, and am fascinated by the way a whole culture can rise in response to a theory and a charismatic individual, and enjoy it as a spectator mainly...

Is he a cult leader?  I have to say that in my opinion, yes he is.

And he can be very humorous and aware and explicit about such things, being the master of postmodern irony that he is, but cult-leader nonetheless.  And I'm sure it must be something of a sacrifice as well as a self-aggrandizing move for him.

He's very interesting and can be quite annoying, depending on what kind of personal investment you have in the man and theory and potential...he was a hero to me for a few years, and when heros fall, it can be ugly of course, so I have to take that into account every time I reconsider him.

[Daniel]

Is he a cult leader?  I have to say that in my opinion, yes he is.

Yes, and I think it skyrocketed after "Kosmic Consciousness" was released and Integral Naked took off. Previously, he just was an author/philosopher. Now, he has much more to protect, much more to defend, more money and investment (reputation) is at stake. The famous "you guys are off your nut" commentary was way overboard... unprofessional.

Until more develop a healthy personal sovereignty (as you have noted Michael), cult leaders will thrive. I think Wilber is a more harmless variety however and would encourage independent thought..within his AQAL matrix that is!

Dan

[jimtzu]

Yes as long as it doesn't get too wrapped up in its own ideological self-importance.  And in my estimation that's exactly what's happening.

Is it true?  Again yes and no.  The "pure" theory of KW seems very true to me by and large.  And the way that theory is used. both internally and externally, by I-I sanctioned people, and critics alike, diminishes the truth value considerably.

Is it beautiful?  Yes in a purely abstract way, devoid of actual realworld situations outside of cloistered walls, it has a very appealing elegance and symmetry.

But it fails most miserably on the aesthetic level for me personally, because it's simply not to my taste anymore.  I love a lot of bits and pieces, and am fascinated by the way a whole culture can rise in response to a theory and a charismatic individual, and enjoy it as a spectator mainly...

michael   your whole post resonates with how i've been feeling. i really like the quoted part.  i just started reading the e-book and while i'm not in a position to argue the finer points of Piaget's work or interpretations and evolution, the one thing that stands out so far are the stats on meditation and his claims of moving up stages.  there does seem to be some playing with the data to meet the premise.  and where else does that occur? we all know about his problem with any kind of criticism and that shows more of an over-inflated ego problem, as does the mis-management of the organizations he's try to establish.

[Daniel]

Right Jim. And referring to Michaels quote that you highlighted, keeping Wilber on the bookshelf and out of Hollywood, perhaps not putting as much weight on I-I so much as an almost flawless spiritual resource for cutting edge Integralites, but as a resource of entertainment.

I have been skimming the e-book as well. Some of the points I can see, others seem a bit nit picky. It would be great if Wilber could actually come out with a book entitled "A Rebuttal To My Critics", I would be very interested to see what he had to say. Well, we know somewhat with the "off your nut" comment.

Dan

[stilltraveler]

I too am nodding to Michael's personal summation. I did log my share of personal hours in doubting and feeling critical in several specific content areas as well as the movement, as I was exposed to him and those majorly assertive comments by proponents. Mostly I'm not quite sure what to think and I feel grateful that though I've been quite interested in him and his work at times, I haven't gotten deeply hooked by it. Part of that may be that I've faced prior disappointment by some of the best. That can be a little immunizing, yes. Michael kept it brief and I too can, though one could reopen various cans of worms.

[jimtzu]

Dan... there's a book that came out in '98 called Ken wilber in dialogue that comes as close as to what you were calling for as it'll get.  kw replying to critics at that time, but it all came down to that they were all harping on previous versions of kw 1, 2, 3 etc.., that he uses all the time... interesting reading tho.
http://www.alibris.com/search/search.cfm

i went thru a couple more chapters tonite (these old eyes can't take much more) of the e-book.  i'd be interested in what michael has to say on the authors take on dean radin and a lot of the other people mentioned in the book.  some of the criticisms are a little picky, and they are coming from a strictly scientific materialistic viewpoint.  i'll have to continue reading.

[henry]

quoting joseph chilton pearce: " people inoculate themselves with the weak form of the virus so when the real thing comes along, there is no danger of catching it"... henry

[Michael]

i'd be interested in what michael has to say on the authors take on dean radin and a lot of the other people mentioned in the book.  some of the criticisms are a little picky, and they are coming from a strictly scientific materialistic viewpoint. 

I haven't actually read the ebook, though I've known of its existence from around the time that he was making a splash on the Integral World website.  I don't much care for the author's tone, though I'm glad of his work nonetheless.  But I'm very glad I'm not him lol    Seems really angry and just plain annoyed at dear 'ole KW for some reason.  Yeah he's coming from a reductionist worldview.

I just skimmed the bits about Dean Radin and co, and have nothing to say about that.  I truly have no dog in that fight.  I'm about as interested in proving or debunking the existence of PSI scientifically as I am in proving or debunking the truth of reincarnation....not much.  They are what they are regardless of scientific proofs as far as I'm concerned.

But  Geoffrey Falk leaves me with a slightly queezy-sleazy feeling when I read his scathing critiques of KW.  I like the way he provokes KW though, it tends to bring out the Wyatt Earpy in him, and helps to demonstrate KW's emotional maturity level.  But I do think Mark Edward's article on being critical is useful for critiquing the Norman Einstein book.  Here's a quote from Bertrand Russell:

In studying a philosopher, the right attitude is neither reverence nor contempt, but first a kind of hypothetical sympathy, until it is possible to know what it feels like to believe in his theories, and only then a revival of the critical attitude, which should resemble, as far as possible, the state of mind of a person abandoning opinions which he has hitherto held. Contempt interferes with the first part of this process, and reverence with the second. Two things are to be remembered: that a man whose opinions and theories are worth studying may be presumed to have had some intelligence, but that no man is likely to have arrived at complete and final truth on any subject whatever.

[jimtzu]

ahhh a wise quote you posted there..  the truth is always found in between the two sides of an argument. 

scanned the mark edwards piece and it reminded me of a title to an instrumental piece i wrote a long time ago called imcomplete misunderstanding 

[Daniel]

Michael, Jimtzu ans Still,

  This all shows how attached we can become to having an explanation, to have it mapped out and rationalized. This is one tendency that Eckhart Tolle speaks of, among others (and other teachers have said the same). It's a good thing, but again our attachment to it. Cognitive frames of references, cognitive content. As important as cognitive capacity? We all desire to have the finest and best in respect to cognitive content. But its just that, the contents in a container. Or another image, do you drive the Volkswagen or the Tesla electric sport car? Or the operating system and the files it contains. Time to switch from Microsoft to Unix? We all seemingly must take some intellectual stance, but its our attachment and identity to it that can hook us.

Daniel

[Michael]

There's another piece to this interesting puzzle floating around the integral cyberspaces these days it seems...

Is Ken a savant?  And what are the implications if this is indeed the case?

Here's a great intro:
http://pods.zaadz.com/ii/discussions/view/115615

And then consider this 60 Minutes segment on a very similar case:
http://leenks.com/link66897.htm



Here's two memorable quotes from the Zaadz thread:

Martin Gifford:

My interest is in humankind's shift from the exclusive competitive survival orientation to the inclusive cooperative happiness orientation. But by focussing on the past and projecting the subsequent patterns into the future, Ken misses the possibility of this leap being made.

Although past patterns included attempts at happiness, they were coming from within the methodology of the exclusive survival orientation. So you would get nations that are relatively happy living next door to nations that were unhappy, and so conflict would arise. With this exclusivity, conflict would come either from the unhappy country, or from paranoid elements within the relatively happy country.

KW:

And I don't know. You hope it's something special, but I could just be a nut! <laughter> I'm not stupid, I'm aware that this is extremely weird and rare - and then you can reflect on what all that means. I think I did more of that when I was a young male, and those kinds of things were important, and people were calling you the next Hegel or something like that. And you know, you think that's great. That just has no meaning to me now; it's just what is, it's what's arising and my duty is to use it responsibly and communicate it to the best of my ability. And that part I do believe. I believe it's some sort of deep metaphysical rule that you're allowed to understand an important truth if you agree to communicate it. And I think if you don't you get sick, your soul gets really, really sick. So that's my main concern, how to handle this responsibly. That's what we're trying to do here, that's what we're trying to do at Integral University and Integral Institute in general.

I've underlined the most interesting part (for me), as this "responsible" use of a value system is my biggest beef with KW.  But if it is true that his vision is limited by his immense gift of pattern recognition, than that would go a long way towards explaining his limited capacities to grasp the dynamics of responsibility in this regard.


Just another piece to the puzzle of mind and heart patterns.

One things stands out though...if he is a savant on the order of the other "brainmen" featured in the 60 minutes program, than he is outstandingly functional overall, and given his "idiot" limitations connected to his "savant" capacities, his vision is amazingly comprehensive...

[henry]

thanks mD. Brainman learned icelandic (difficult) in a week. a while back i was accused of being a sexist here among other things and our new enthusiastic member Sleipnir from iceland was online listening, and thought better of participating in a forum with a creep like henry. maybe "sexist" doesn't translate gracefully into icelandic. ..henry

[Nickeson]

Hey,
The other day, against all better judgment, I dropped a shekel or two in the collection plate to gain admittance into the Integral? Spiritual Center because I needed to know if Mister Wilber's latest book could make any better functioning sense than other on-line explications of the 8-Fold Integral Methodological Plural Case Hooha Process (I?ve forgotten its real name) that has now replaced Orienting Generalizations as the preferred way to get from Ah to Zed in the most expeditious Turquoisean manner and in, hopefully, shorter sentences than this one turned out being.

Once within those sacred electrons, I was struck by the stylistic similarities among: 1) Integral Spirituality, 2) a type of polemical tract popular in the more rarified New Left circles of the late 60s, and 3) the delivery style of certain mainstream Christian Television Sermonizers.  The style is fast, facile, slick, and dense with apparent information. It is almost like a stream of consciousness enhanced with cue-cards on the inside of the eyelids. It conforms perfectly with Mister Wilber?s observations in the interview posted on the Zaadz link (above) that his first fast draft of a book is in large part the only one.  And despite the fact that I had just done it, I have to say that I wouldn?t ordinarily give a dime for anything that was coming at me in the way those words were. Having practiced the art as a New Left polemicist 40 years ago I?m wary of the perspective behind the style because I believe it is based in a recognition of patterns, very well-practiced and long messaged subjective patterns, that are either blue prints to an Air Castle or the projected taxonomy of the propounder?s psyche (sometimes these ostensible two are actually one and the same).

I do not believe that it takes a great deal of effort or will or Savantizing for one to take the mind?s natural organizing-for-survival functions in hand and amp them up a bit to create patterns for organizing-beyond-just-survival. When I am working hot steel on the anvil I am rarely conscious of the effect of each blow of the hammer. Instead there is an interior pattern more or less in the form of the form toward which I am working, combined with the integrated patterns of how I hold the steel in my left hand, and how I hold the hammer in my right, and how the respective muscles feel, and how the blows ring and how bright is the color of the heat, and it all becomes a progressively changing pattern of a processional dance of hammer and steel. I no longer have to think about it much. The first draft is the last draft and it was organized out of body and brain functions set into patterns outside of precise, specific consciousness. Sometime the result comes out more pleasing than the form I had in mind and I neither remember how it got that way, nor could I consciously recreate the process. In a less scientific era I might say such a form was created by destiny or given to the world through me by the Holy Ghost. No; it is a product of hand/eye coordination, sensory attunement, a gift for more impulse than constraint, and many hours of playing the smithing game, one that by its nature falls in the domain of extroverted action.

Across that particular spectrum, the game of composing the polemics was introverted and reflective, but it worked more or less the same way.  In the hay-day of the New Left there was a great deal of wrangling for standing as Marxian Analysts. Herbert Marcuse constructed the template for us, though the words he used to fill it were sound and substantial. We, mostly students, removed his words from the form and we refilled it as if it were a precisely partitioned interior file folder with our own words taken from voracious but highly selective  reading reinforced by long conversations with others who thought just exactly as we did. When the time came for regurgitation, all we had to do was open that file folder and dictate the contents onto the page. There was even a trance-like quality to the spill-all atmosphere of the exposition. Now whether or not the final treatise had anything to do with anything other than the shaped catalog of words in the propounder?s mind was a totally dicey matter. But if it hung together internally then we would certify it as valid. The generally held fact that one could profitably push the analysis on the school grounds (though one might not be able to sell it on the street) came from the highly homogeneous and closely wrapped contextual circle that was the disquisition?s audience, ritual setting and social vortex. Outside of that context it could just have easily sounded like word salad of someone far, far away in chemical alteration.

It was easy then to project that shaped catalog of words and their relationships as The Truth upon the world because they were so solid and secure within our minds. By the consensus of all those whom we took seriously it was The Valid Truth and we didn?t have to talk to anyone else and if we did and they disagreed then by the consensus of all whom we took seriously, they were wrong. Marx had assured the world that the patterns with which we worked formed The Universally True Structure. It was settled. It was right. All our efforts were consecrated by the One True Structure to whom these little essays were our harped hosannas.

The same kind of polished delivery that paints the deliverer as a sapient, charismatic, avuncular messenger of god?s conditionally unconditioned love, grace and truth?a man of omniscience save for an occasional demurral that he is not?can be seen and heard, television-wise, on a Sunday morning in the sermon from almost any semi-liberal protestant media minister. This has been the minister?s frame and state of mind since the second year of seminary. His psyche is a perfectly symmetrical pattern of divine index card files through which he earnestly tours each sermon. He recognizes, wu wei, the location of each little box, each discrete card that will give him the gem he needs to tease out the tithes five words hence. (A more entertaining example of the same thing can be witnessed if one has the opportunity to see a group of advanced drama students drop into a set of mock Shakespeare improvisations. One can study there the practiced and formalized patterns into which the actors fall with almost trance-like precision.)

W.A. Mozart was well known for composing and orchestrating symphonies in one draft, listening to the perfectly symmetrical structure of the music in his head. He had been practicing that, living that since barely past his infancy. The strictures for music in his time demanded balance, harmony and form and he had the exquisite talent for being able to set that form in his mind and fill in every blank note from every instrument as he went along. I have found in casual conversation that most people like Mozart because of the familiar consistency of his music. I am not among them; to me Mozart is boring and lacks depth. He sounds as if he were a prisoner of the perfect patterns in his era and in his head. Beethoven, on the other hand, discovered depth in freedom from structure, and though he wrote less he accomplished more.

And so with the patterns of single draft symphonies, philosophical polemics, semi-liberal protestant pastors in mind, I circle back to Mister Wilber. A month or so ago I wrote in the opening of the ?Well Log: Integral? thread that my first impression of Integral two years ago was that AQAL is not the map of the known universe as projected by Mister Wilber but the pattern of his psyche conformed from the academically delineated postures of the American middle class.  I suspect that the main difference  between the style of Mozart and that of Mister Wilber is that Mozart did not believe that the music he heard and so fastidiously copied out came from nature or the spheres or any orchestra external to his being, but originated within the patterns he had assimilated and steadfastly developed and perfected. Does Mister Wilber have that same wisdom?

In that same ?Well Log: Integral? essay I wrote that Mister Wilber?s sloppy and selective disregard for standards of proof reminded me of the Evangelistic Style. I wrote he sounded like an evangelist, but for what I did not know. After cruising through the Integral? Spiritual Center, I have now a better idea. Within the ?Media? section of the Center are two videos of welcoming addresses that Mister Wilber gave to participants in two different Center sponsored weekend workshops or seminars. In both videos Mister Wilber impressed upon his congregation that humanity?s only salvation lay in the adoption of contemplative religion. In one of the presentations his emphasis was such that the substitution of the words ?Our lord and Savior Jesus Christ? for ?contemplative religion,? would have put him in league with the Rev. Pat Robertson. He was evangelizing, and evangelists (by definition) know The Truth, and the Truth will guide him most assuredly into the Responsible Path and though he might demure and say in an interview he ?hopes? he can be Responsible, in his heart of hearts he knows for certain that he will be. To be any other way just isn?t in the cards, or the patterns, or the Truth he needs by metaphysical statute to communicate.
All of our worries on that point should be laid aside.
Thank you for your kind attention,
Steven

[Michael]

Ah thank you again Meister Steven for another e-pistel! ( or do I mean e-pissel?)    Your humble log structures beat any aircastle blueprints I've yet encountered...    And thanks for the tidbits regarding the Marxist players.  Very interesting...

The way I read the situation is that aircastles are made of words, and float by means of MEANING.  The greater the quantity and quality of meaning, the floatier and seductive the castle.  It is rather amazing to me though, the extent to which aircastles can manage to stay aloft. 

Thanks for returning us to the basics of instinct.  I wish I had more time to share some similarities in the matter of artistic production as instinct.  Much of what you speak of distinctly reminds me of my own video-art creative process, though they are worlds apart in the sense of degree of abstraction.