stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

188 STRIPPING THE GURUS
are always egocentrically focused and literally/concretely believed.
Consider, then, Wilber’s (1991; italics added) own attitude toward
the possible effect of his second wife’s death on the weather,
where 115 mph gale-force winds beat the surrounding area at exactly
the point of her passing:
The winds, I suppose, were coincidence. Nonetheless, the
constant rattling and shaking of the house simply added to
the feeling that something unearthly was happening. I remember
trying to go back to sleep, but the house was rattling
so hard I got up and put some blankets around the windows
in the bedroom, fearing they would shatter. I finally drifted
off, thinking, “Treya is dying, nothing is permanent, everything
is empty, Treya is dying....”
That, as a simple reporting of facts, is fine. However, years
later, in his (2000a) journals, Wilber “coincidentally” reprinted a
letter he received from the spouse of a hospitalized, terminal cancer
sufferer, who had been touched by Treya’s story:
As [my wife] died in the afternoon a great storm and strong
rain came up. And I saw a great grey cloud going upstairs
from her body and drifting away out of the opened window.
After twenty minutes the storm was over.
It is difficult to imagine Wilber including that specific letter in
his reprints without it being implicitly in support of a “cosmic” nature
to his own experiences. That is so even in spite of his previous
“I suppose” (as opposed to a skeptical/rational “of course”) regard
for the “coincidental” nature of the winds blowing during his wife’s
death. After all, with the “great storm and strong rain” being explicitly
associated with a “great grey cloud” rising from the dying
person’s body in the latter case, could it really have been just coincidence
for a similar storm to have arisen in his own wife’s death?
(If Wilber thought that that grey cloud and accompanying storm
were pre-rational nonsense, he need not have included them in his
own reprint of the letter. For, they are not at all essential to the
man’s story. Indeed, he need not have reprinted the fan letter at
all, were it not to support his own magical/mythical wishes.)
If Wilber’s winds (or Da’s “corona”) were real parapsychological
phenomena, beyond mere coincidence or imagination, that