stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

178 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Further, contrary to Wilber’s claim that he “greatly appreciate[s]
responsible criticism,” he has (to my knowledge) totally ignored
Lane’s (1996) devastating deconstruction of the numerous
invalid aspects of his worldview. By contrast, he did find time to
respond (1999) in excruciating detail to Heron’s (1997) more recent
critique of his psychological model, and even later to Hans-Willi
Weis (Wilber, 2003a) and de Quincey (Wilber, 2001). Of course,
those responses were given in contexts where, unlike the situation
with Lane, Wilber could show, at least to his own satisfaction, that
the criticisms of his ideas were not valid.
In defending his own published polemics, Wilber (2000) has
recently offered the following misleading explanations:
Sex, Ecology, Spirituality is in some ways an angry book.
Anger, or perhaps anguish, it’s hard to say which. After
three years immersed in postmodern cultural studies, where
the common tone of discourse is rancorous, mean-spirited,
arrogant, and aggressive ... after all of that, in anger and anguish,
I wrote SES, and the tone of the book indelibly reflects
that.
In many cases it is specific: I often mimicked the tone of
the critic I was criticizing, matching toxic with toxic and
snide with snide. Of course, in doing so I failed to turn the
other cheek. But then, there are times to turn the other
cheek, and there are times not to.
As for the dozen or so theorists that I polemically criticized
[in the first edition of Sex, Ecology, Spirituality], every single
one of them, without exception, had engaged in “condemnatory
rhetoric” of equal or usually much worse dimensions
(Wilber, 2001; italics added).
Bohm, however, although not mentioned in SES—except in
that his (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order is included in
the bibliography, though being mis-dated there as 1973, the year of
publication of one of the papers which later became a chapter in
that book—is an exception to that self-absolution. For, he never
stooped to any such nasty, snide behavior toward Wilber. Thus, the
above rationalizations cannot be validly applied to justifying Wilber’s
unduly vexed comments about Bohm’s consistently honest,
humble and insightful work. The most that Bohm was ever “guilty”
of was in having simply never responded to Wilber’s original