stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

NORMAN EINSTEIN 181
ments, on which points Wilber is consistently and wildly
wrong, as we have seen and will sadly see much more of]
that he could find something to hate about it, too, and we are
all eagerly looking forward to his next round of criticism, although
I’m sure that I will be forgiven if I don’t respond,
since I might have more important things to do, like feed my
goldfish.
One might take that condescending, lame attempt at “half a
wit” as an implicit admission by Wilber that, in other cases too,
when he has disagreed with but not responded to other authors’
ideas, it was simply because he had “more important things to do.”
That is, they did not merit a response from him.
How, then, would such a person be likely to react if he were to
suddenly find himself on the receiving end of the same behavior, in
apparently being “ignored until he went away”? Would he perhaps
unconsciously take that behavior as being driven by the same motivations
as he himself has openly admitted to possessing? That is,
would he take it as his colleagues evidently feeling that they had
“more important things to do” than to waste time explaining things
to him?
Would he then perhaps feel sufficiently insulted by that as to
periodically lash out at the people who have not “given him his
due,” in the form of a response—any response? (Without receiving
an answer, after all, one feels as though one does not exist in the
other person’s world. As Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “I am seen: therefore
I am.”)
Would such a long-term lack of response further perhaps even
leave him feeling confident that he could lash out in unprovoked
nastiness, without having to worry about the targets of his insults
“hitting back”? (As Matsakis [1996] observed in a different context,
in discussing “express[ing] your anger in a letter,” never to be
mailed: you “can be as nasty as you want without worrying about it
backfiring on you.”)
Would that not account for his continuing, and wholly unprovoked,
mistreatment of the late David Bohm?
Interestingly, by Wilber’s own (1991) admission:
[W]hen fear overcomes me, my ordinary lightness of outlook
... degenerates into sarcasm and snideness, a biting bitterness
toward those around me—not because I am snide by nature,
but because I am afraid.