stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

NORMAN EINSTEIN 187
vouches for their existence ... or touts the value of the Q-Link pendant,
for that matter.
Beyond that, Wilber’s aforementioned excoriating of New Age
believers for their innocent position on healing cannot be meant
simply to “spiritually awaken them.” On the contrary, their denigrated
view simply demands more responsibility than he evidently
wishes to ascribe to human actions—including his own and those
of his late wife. Indeed, that belief in the power of the mind,
whether valid or not, is no more (and no less) pre-rational or magical
than is Wilber’s own acceptance of psychic phenomena, and his
own acknowledged (even if merely imagined) perception of subtle
energy flows, from claimed healers and otherwise.
Wilber’s second wife actually entertained similar ideas to
these (with regard to responsibility), at a point where she felt that
he was blaming her for his lack of interest, at that time, in book
writing:
[H]e may not want to feel responsible himself, it might be
easier for him to think it’s [my] fault. What might be behind
that? Maybe he’s afraid it’s his fault. Maybe he doesn’t want
to take responsibility for his not writing....
Later that day I checked this scenario out with Ken, but
very gently, no blame. He gave me a gold star, I hit it pretty
close on the nose (in Wilber, 1991).
In any case, such patterns of behavior as Wilber admitted to
his own late wife never confine themselves to any one aspect or
incident in a person’s life. Rather, they shape all aspects of one’s
existence, whether one is consciously aware of that or not.
* * *
Of myth and magic, now, Wilber (2000b) has stated:
Unless otherwise indicated, when I use the word “mythic” it
refers to preformal, concrete-literal mythic images and symbols,
some aspects of which are in fact imbued with cognitive
inadequacies, for these myths claim as empirical fact many
things that can be empirically disproved—e.g., the volcano
erupts because it is personally mad at you; the clouds move
because they are following you. These preformal mythic beliefs,
scholars from Piaget to Joseph Campbell have noted,