INTEGRAL WORLD MAILING LIST 
http://www.integralworld.net

Newsletter Nr. 794
Amsterdam, September 7th, 2019


YOU ARE WHAT YOU HATE - Wilber and a Post-Truth World - SCOTT F. PARKER

When I first published on Wilber it was about the experience of having been among his disciples. The questions that occupied my attention were: What is it about this writer that attracts a cult? What was it about me that I wanted to belong to it?

That I was able to begin writing from after the fact was due mostly to good books and good luck. Foremost, Jeff Meyerhoff's Bald Ambition finished the job of dismantling the edifice of Wilber's thought for me. I was lucky to read that book as it was published on this site. It came at a good time for me.

Just a few years earlier, encountering such criticism would have led me to double down on my commitment to Wilber and to reject Meyerhoff out of hand. But by 2006 my utopian dreams for the Integral crowd had already been revealed to me as naive. And the intellectual edifice the utopian vision depended on, which Meyerhoff would dismantle for me, had already begun to show its cracks.

Read more:
http://www.integralworld.net/parker8.html


SYNTHESIZING THE KOSMOS? - SCOTT F. PARKER

As an undergraduate philosophy student, I was discouraged from submitting an honors thesis on Ken Wilber, with whom my advisors were not familiar. Devoted as I was to Wilber's work, their caution only encouraged my efforts to enlighten them of its merits. The thesis I submitted, Synthesizing the Kosmos: A Critical Study of Ken Wilber, was 190 pages of fawning commentary on Sex, Ecology, Spirituality followed by a dozen or so pages of moderate criticism, from which the following is drawn.

I am pulling this out of the file drawer all these years later because 1) the criticisms still apply to Wilber-IV; and 2) the early limning of Wilber's place within his system anticipates the concerns of my accompanying essay, “You Are What You Hate: Wilber and a Post-Truth World.”

Read more:
http://www.integralworld.net/parker9.html