Just bought a copy of ‘What is Enlightenment’ (on ‘Woman’). What a bitter disappointment. Now I remember why I gave up buying it. One word – trite.
First complaint: Ken is still allowing people to write “Wilber is one of the most highly regarded philosophers today”. By whom? A select group in the US. I can assure you that Wilber is hardly known here in Oz, let alone the rest of the world, and if he is known it more as a New Age pseudo-philosopher. You can pick up any book by genuinely well-regarded modern philosophers and find no reference to Wilber. So why allow this obvious lie to be printed? Does Wilber think that serious people don’t understand the difference between hype and genuine credibility?
Now if Ken wants to be taken seriously and to avoid the New Age tag, then why does he do this regular gig with Cohen in a magazine that carries ads for a range of dubious teachers and products? And what’s with the I-I ad on page 115? The ILP starter kit with ‘3 booklets (over 150 pages), The Essential ILP poster, Gold Star Practices (what, no elephant stamp?). In the words of John McEnroe, ‘You can’t be serious’!
Second complaint: The atrocious scholarship behind the articles. I simply gagged when I read the piece by Elizabeth Debold. She talks about Christian women, but where was the mention of pagan women? Like Hypatia, chief scientist at the library of Alexandria? Salonica, the wife of emperor Gallienus, who was a student of Plotinus and who encouraged her husband to build a city devoted entirely to philosophy? What of the fact that the Pythagorean school accepted women? What of the women philosophers such as the Pythagorean Chilonis. Then Debold has the hide to suggest that the suffragette movement in the US was a significant step forward to women. Hello! The suffragette movement was a world-wide phenomenon, with England being the driving force. The first constituency to grant universal suffrage and allow women to run for office was South Australia in 1894. (New Zealand gave limited rights in 1886). Australia followed in 1914. The US ammended the constitution in 1920.
If this is the Integral movement then Kali help us.
good points, Ray.
i’d like to see you write more about the women you’ve mentioned. your complaints on the WIE is valid. so how about submitting an article to them? or maybe posting an essay on the IntegralWorld site. i’d read it
~C
Hi Ray,
Yes, I also thought this issue was a HUGE disappointment. I’ve actually been putting off writing a complaint letter to WIE about it, because I found this issue male-biased to the point of ridiculousness and I was so angry that I thought it would be best to wait till my emotions subsided!
I have been researching forgotten women mystics, philosophers, Nobel-worthy scientists who never got recognized, mathematicians, inventors, etc. etc. for ages now, and I thought it was simply shameful that Elizabeth Debold just dismissed all these women as being “just enough to fill in a Women’s History Month” every now and then.
That these women, against all the odds stacked up against them, managed to achieve the things they did, was a miracle in itself. That you have to take women’s studies or women’s history courses to find out about them is supremely tragic.
In the Guru-Pandit dialogue, Ken makes a big deal about men’s superior physical strength, but why does nobody talk about some of the biological strengths of women? Childbirth is not a small deal, and it’s known to trigger spiritual and kundalini awakenings. In fact I’ve often found it interesting that a lot of male violence seems to be against pregnant women — because childbirth is a realm of exclusively female power.
WIE and the Cohen community is generally kind of patronizing towards women, I’ve noticed. Not a good sign.
Oh yeah, and to not talk about women’s self-defense in an issue on women is a crime. Actually there is a very rich body of literature on the philosophy behind women’s self-defense. The Mother of Auroville was emphatic about the physical training of women (of men too, of course, but I mean she braved all the sexist resistances from people who claimed that women were weak and shouldn’t have to go through the same physical training as men). WIE could have featured female kung fu artists (as a matter of fact some martial arts schools were founded by women), but God forbid we ever depict authentically strong female role models. No, women need men to show them the way to enlightenment.
Re: Cohen and women:
http://whatenlightenment.blogspot.com/2006/12/andrew-cohen-and-corruption-of-power.html
http://whatenlightenment.blogspot.com/2006/12/andrew-cohen-and-donations-under.html
Hi Ned,
Didn’t even bother to read the Cohen/Wilber dialogue. I don’t think these guys have any idea about feminism. This is another area where Wilber gets it wrong. But I’ve been hoping a woman takes him to task.
Ray: loved reading your comments! I agree with ~C, why not email them to the WIE team? To their credit, I’ve noticed they do include criticisms in their letters section. Of course, for all we know there’s heaps of criticism they don’t include.
Ned: yes, excellent point about childbirth! I’d add menstruation. too, since most men (myself included) get queasy at the sight of even a drop of blood; for woman it’s just a natural part of their existence. No wonder pagan religions were based around fertility and lunar cycles, and neopaganism, wicca etc acknowledges the power of women
Ray: yeah, I didn’t read the guru pandit thing for the same reason. But I doubt any woman around KW will take him to task, because his charisma does seem to encourage a sort of passive and devotional attitude in his followers. That’s why they keep going on about him being the greatest living philosopher. It’s the “integral” equivalent of saying one’s guru is a supreme realised master or whatever.
I seriously think that after Ken passes his followers will apotheosise him; and make him into a combination of Christ and boddhisattva.
Hi Ray,
Lucky you to have missed reading the Guru/Pandit dialogue — it was just obnoxious! Actually I thought Ken’s ideas on feminism were not half-bad in “Sex, Ecology and Spirituality”, because he does say that whatever biological differences necessitated strict gender roles at some point in human evolution are being transcended as humanity grows spiritually.
One more comment: in the dialogue Ken and Andrew Cohen talk about some of the differences between men and women and bring in the point that women can’t “hold formation with one another”. First of all I’ve often heard about this stereotype of women not getting along with each other, and there’s some truth to how often women are their own and each others’ worst enemies. But there have been enough women who have held female bonding in high regard — the lesbian feminist movement, anyone? However, Ken then goes on to triumphantly declare: “That’s why there are so many all-male rock bands and such few all-female rock bands.”
At this point I just shook my head and thought that this is what happens when you think you are an authority on everything from God to pop culture. The devil always overreaches! Ken must have never attended Ladyfest or the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. He must have missed the ENTIRE riot grrrl punk rock movement (which was partially responsible for my own feminist awakening). Actually there are now *so many* all-female rock bands that if I started listing them, it would take forever. I just thought this comment was ridiculous — my 15-year-old kid sister is a drummer and has been in two rock bands. She’s “holding formation” just fine — and hint, she’s not enlightened in the least, she’s just a spoilt teenage brat like everyone else her age!
All sorts of other silly stuff abounded in this issue. One writer reviewing a book on the differences between male and female brains told a story about how she was drowning and her brother kicked into fight-or-flight mode and saved her … and I was just like, uh, so what? Once I was drowning and my *sister* kicked into fight-or-flight mode and saved *me*. There are female lifeguards in this world, you know! It’s one thing to talk about differences in brains but to jump from that to talking about males having overall advantages in certain fields is a huge extrapolation.
Well, this is a complex topic in general. Traditionalism (in most religions and especially in Islam) and traditionalist metaphysics are generally juxtaposed against the secular feminist/leftist approach as far as gender goes. Feminists/leftists (and I’m probably exaggerating this here  I hate making blanket statements like this about any group, but just for the sake of practicality let me go with this) see sex as an objective biological fact and gender as an arbitrary and often superficial social construction.
Traditionalist metaphysics seems to go in the opposite direction: gender is a universal property of the creation as a whole, and is found in every created thing. Gender exists in the terrestrial world because it’s a materialisation of gender as it exists in the universe as a whole. And men and women are basically manifestations of two wholly different and separate archetypes in the traditionalist view. It’s usually on this basis that traditionalists build up this (in my view, hypocritical) picture of a “benevolent patriarchy”. At worst, this means that as creation submits to God, so woman submits to man. At best, you get a social situation where men and women are “different but equal” but in practice this usually means relegating women to all the boring tasks.
So how to reconcile these two diametrically opposed views? If one is agnostic or atheist, of course, it’s easy — you just dismiss all of traditionalist metaphysics as nonsense.
If you do think that the play of ideas and archetypes in Consciousness is what causes things to come into physical manifestation, then traditional metaphysics has to be contended with. The way Sri Aurobindo and the Mother deal with this is to bring in the great insight of modernity, i.e. evolution, which is missing from all the premodern cosmologies. In the evolution a great deal of intermixing takes place so that although there was an original raison d’etre or archetype responsible for the existence of each of the sexes (or each of the races for that matter), there is no longer any “pure” biological sex or “pure” biological race anymore. Each human being is a unique soul with a unique purpose to execute. So they would say that this intermixing is just a part of returning to the original nondual Oneness and evolving toward unity-in-diversity.
Actually I guess this is just a problem with traditionalism in general, it just can’t grapple with the modern concept of the individual, hence you see traditionalists who have no problems being sexist or aristocratic or even racist at times.
Sorry, Ray — you’ve awoken the beast!
Argh, I have very little patience for sexism.
Hi Alan,
I hope some day I can write something to counter this sort of sexism!
Just hoping to reach a certain level of maturity before I attempt such a thing, though.
I can’t help but remember the words of the Mother here:
“Instead of there being two lines, one masculine and one feminine, there should be one single being, and that’s what I conceive as the solution of all problems  all problems, not only this one  and as the prototype of the supramental creation.”
Hi Ned,
Great stuff. What Wilber doesn’t acknowledge is that there are shades of masculine/feminine, with some female minds born into male bodies and vice versa, causing gender identity problems (‘but I was born a boy!’).
The women friends in my life have been all shades, gay, bi, assertive, girly, strong, etc. Sure, biology plays a part, but its the differences that are interesting.
And you are right about women’s music. Where does Ken get this shit? Might the fact that the industry is run by men have something to do with it? Or does he forget that women are still actively discriminated against.
Maybe we should put him the ring with a testosterone fuelled female wrestler, boxer or kickboxer? He should have met Trudi, a past work mate – a female body builder into fast cars.
Yeah, this is the whole thing — everyone’s an individual, everyone is unique. That’s what people should be encouraged to believe from day one, so that these stifling stereotypes can just disappear once and for all. But I guess people just can’t resist making simplistic mental generalizations.
Ned said But I guess people just can’t resist making simplistic mental generalizations.
And this is what I dislike about the whole AQAL/SD system and the Wilberian tradition in general, it encourages precisely these sort of generalisations, and blocks creative analysis that is “outside the box”.
It is telling that even in his more psychological statements KW never uses original data himself. It is always “Kegan says this” and “Loevinger says that”. And with transpersonal statements, he never once brings in his own experiences. It is always only mental-abstractionist misinterpretations of Plotinus, Shankara, Sri Aurobindo, etc, etc
I think this is a no-win situation, Alan. If you cite the data or experiences of others, some may accuse you of lacking originality. But if you cite your own experiences, others will say, why should we believe you?
Indeed, Wilber has at times cited his own experiences, as in One Taste. If he has not used these experiences extensively in support of his system, that’s because this would turn off even more the academics he is trying to woo. The academic approach, we all know, is to establish observations or concepts by reference to others, in this case to show that certain kinds of experiences are cited often enough by others to make them believable in somewhat the same way that scientific observations become accepted through repetition. There are certainly problems with this approach, but some of them–such as the cherry-picking that Meyerhoff has discussed–are simply reflections of Wilber’s poor methodology. Carried out more rigorously and honestly, the approach does at least have the potential to get academia to pay attention.
In the meantime, I don’t see that the alternative is any better. There have always been people who claim to be realized, and build schools entirely on their own experiences. People argue endlessly over who is and who is not genuine, but the dominant Western political and cultural systems remain unswayed by any of them.
Hi, Im from Melbourne.
I stopped buying WIE when they promoted the atrocious Robert Goodwin. I also sent them a letter re this decision.
I was also finding KW to be somewhat boring.
I know you guys dont particularly like him but this author provides a unique understanding of the male/female polarties of the body and how all experiences are fabricated by the brain nervous complex.
Please check out:
1. http://www.dabase.org/twoarmc.htm
2. http://www.dabase.org/meaning.htm
Plus the same communication made visually to the Whole Body, prior to the thinking mind’s efforts to categorize and objectify.
1. http://www.daplastique.com
That whole crowd claims to be spiritual, but IMO, the real agenda is they’re fascinated by power and violence and by power imbalances and because they’re unconscious/unintegrated about, act this out by glamorizing authoritarian power via abusive gurus and other spiritual celebrities.
Look at the obsession with hierarchy and rank and pecking order–eg how evolved are you, what color are you in the color code scheme, etc.
Its just as much a trap as the various obsessions going on in secular society, just tarted up with spiritual language.
As soon as enough people seem to figure out WIlberian Integralism, you can bet a new upgrade will be issued, to ensure folks will keep right on scrambling to catch up with the new terminology and the ever more complex model.
If you’re into power and domination..at least admit that that is what turns you on. Dressing it up in spiriutal consciousness studies language just clouds the issue and keeps things abstracted and unconcious.
If people are conscious of wanting to play with power and pecking order, domination and submission, then it is possible to negotiate boundaries and limits so that everyone gets satisfied and things stay challenging without going over the limits into trauma and abuse.
I just made a change to the main article. I had claimed that the stoic Sphaerus was a woman. This was incorrect. I thought I had read this on the internet.
Here is one more try:
Re: Ray Harris’ first complaint
“Ken is still allowing people to write “Wilber is one of the most highly regarded philosophers todayâ€Â. By whom? A select group in the US. I can assure you that Wilber is hardly known here in Oz, let alone the rest of the world, and if he is known it more as a New Age pseudo-philosopher. … So why allow this obvious lie to be printed? Does Wilber think that serious people don’t understand the difference between hype and genuine credibility?”
Serious people understand very well the difference between hype and genuine credibility, which is why serious people have nothing to do with Wilber or his kind. For them it is quite obvious that only lies are really profitable and that consequently mostly only lies are allowed to be printed.
I first came across his name in 2001, when on the MegaBoard someone has ridiculed his TOE. So I read through Wilber’s writings and wrote a disgusted e-mail to be posted on his Shambhala website. It was never answered or published. Being very familiar with Koestler’s and von Bertalanffy’s works on the Concept of the Holon and the General System Research, and the correct use of the word, or rather concept, of “integral” going back many decades, and having myself already had books and essays published and also lectured on these subjects, I was deeply annoyed with the way he has bastardized up all of it into a concoction that might please a moronic subspecies, but is an offence to an intelligent man. He is abusing the word “integral”, as he is basically a differentialist set out to please his public at any cost. And I will stand up for these statements against anybody who cares to debate them on a purely rational basis.
“So what exactly is such a “highly regarded philosopher†doing on the pages of a blatantly self-promoting ‘popularist’ magazine aimed primarily at what the publishing business would regard as a New Age market?”
The answer is contained in Ray’s question: Such a (only in the US) “highly regarded philosopher”, is a self-appointed and a blatantly self-promoting ‘popularist’ pseudo-guru of a range of dubious sectarian pseudo-teachers, aimed primarily at what the publishing business would regard as a New Age, or any other lucrative market?
IMO KW is not a philosopher. I regard him as an entrepreneur and an impresario, a collector of people. He has a personal fiefdom in the subsection of the US entertainment industry that some have termed ‘The Enlightenment Industry.’
The Enlightement Industry driven by image, hype and celebrity, and turns spiritual attainment/enlightenment into a commodity.
The Wilberian sector of the Enlightenment industry seems to be about power– glamorizing and fetishing authoritarian power, and which prevents Wilberian Integralists from actually ever becoming able to think consciously about power and its proper use and abuse.
For for sake of comparison, go read this article by Unberto Eco
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_blackshirt.html
For further reading there are two essays on Dash’s blog
http://dashh.typepad.com/
The Wilber Effect, where it is suggested that KW’s writings generate a mood altering effect by giving readers a feeling/illusion of mastery–feeling powerful that actually obscures any ability to examine power in a conscious manner
and Winning the Integral Game
Here are a few from the 14 point list:
9. For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle. (Compare with the emphasis by Cohen on ‘evolutionary tension and constant striving)
Thus pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. It is bad because life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies have to be defeated, there must be a final battle, after which the movement will have control of the world. But such “final solutions” implies a further era of peace, a Golden Age, which contradicts the principle of permanent war. No fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this predicament.
10. Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology, insofar as it is fundamentally aristocratic, and aristocratic and militaristic elitism cruelly implies contempt for the weak.
“Ur-Fascism can only advocate a popular elitism. Every citizen belongs to the best people in the world, the members or the party are the best among the citizens, every citizen can (or ought to) become a member of the party. But there cannot be patricians without plebeians. In fact, the Leader, knowing that his power was not delegated to him democratically but was conquered by force, also knows that his force is based upon the weakness of the masses; they are so weak as to need and deserve a ruler.”
(My note: in Wilberism elitism translates into rationalizing spiritual abuse as necessary for attaining full human potential and despising anyone who disagrees. Go read Wilbers essay on Rude Boy gurus
http://www.globalserve.net/~sarlo/Ywilber.htm
Alan Kazlev offers reflections on this matter in the section of this
essay entitled The Problem of Abusive Gurus)
http://www.integralworld.net/index.html?kazlev2.html
Note: Points 9 and 10 are from the Umberto Eco article.
“You can pick up any book by genuinely well-regarded modern philosophers and find no reference to Wilber.”
The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science (published 2006-12-11)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199279276/
Chapter 31: Toward a Comprehensive Integration of Science and Religion: A Post-metaphysical Approach by Sean Esbjörn-Hargens and Ken Wilber (pp. 523-547)
http://kenwilber.com/Writings/PDF/Religion_and_Science_Ch_31.pdf
True. But he still has to take second place to (i.e. have his name listed after) Sean Hargens
In contrast, in the Integral movement, Sean is very much secondary to Ken.
This shows the difference between the Orthodox Wilberian movement, which I consider to be a New Age religion (albeit still a part of the laregr Integral movement), and Academia.
I am not disputing that Wilber has a very small presence in mainstream academia. But the overformalised nature and rigidity of Wilber’s AQAL system (ably critiqued by Andy Smith, Steve McIntosh (in his book Integral Consciousness), and others), his inability to accept peer review, the fact that he incorporates concepts like spiritual experiences, and the highly religious nature of his organisation (uncritical acceptance off his work, and adulation of Wilber as “bodhisattvic”), work against him, if it is mainstream academic approval that he is after.