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Newsletter Nr. 636	
Amsterdam, January 6th, 2016


INTEGRAL APARTHEID - Ken Wilber's Cousins, Color-Coding, and the Nazi Problem - DAVID LANE

“To put it in the bluntest terms possible, this means around 70% of the world's population is Nazis.” (Integral Spirituality, p. 179)

I have to admit, even though I have been a harsh critic of some of Wilber's ideas (particularly his misrepresentation of evolution and his fawning praise of vainglorious gurus such as Adi Da and Andrew Cohen), I do commend him for his willingness to go out on a limb, to crib the title of Shirley MacLaine's 1983, paranormal filled autobiography.

By doing such, it makes it easier to pinpoint once again some of Ken Wilber's major intellectual weaknesses, including his persistent tendency for hyperbole, misuse of statistics, and color-coded stereotyping. Now to be fair, I don't know Wilber's cousins (are we talking first and second only?), so maybe he is privy to their reading material and other habits. Mein Kampf prominently displayed on the fire mantle piece along with photographs of Eva Braun?

While I can readily appreciate that there are different levels of moral and cognitive growth in the human population and that our religions reflect varying stages of consciousness (see Wilber's A Sociable God), is Wilber's pernicious habit of numbered grouping, name calling, and color labeling really a progressive and informative way to genuinely understand the cosmos and our place within it?

Read more:
http://www.integralworld.net/lane113.html

FROM THE ARCHIVES:

LORD, GIVE US INTEGRAL BUT WITHOUT THE HYPE - A Review of "Integral Spirituality" - FRANK VISSER

Ken Wilber's latest book Integral Spirituality (2006), which was published last month, has been eagerly awaited by a wide audience of readers. For his last theoretical contribution dates back from 2000, when Integral Psychology was published. It would be the first publication marking the "Wilber-5" phase on integral thought (since the second volume of the Kosmos trilogy is still awaiting its publication).

That book, Integral Psychology, incidentally, had a long incubation period. As early as 1982, Wilber announced a two-volume handbook, tentatively titled System, Self and Structure, which would be a sustained look at the basic categories of psychology (learning, development, repression etc.), from the (then) transpersonal (now integral) point of view. For several reasons, that handbook never got to be written. In The Eye of Spirit, which appeared in 1997, he referred to it humorously as the "book I have been not-writing for 15 years". Finally, Integral Psychology was presented as a quick summary of its main tenets, so it could be included into volume IV of the Collected Works (released in 2000).

Read more:
http://www.integralworld.net/visser16.html