stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

NORMAN EINSTEIN 189
would mean that real magic exists, in the ability of human
thoughts, intentions and/or emotions (i.e., subtle bodies) to affect
the physical world. And in that case, New Agers could not rationally
be excoriated for believing in such things. Rather, they should
then instead be celebrated for having “correctly” divined and appreciated
that aspect of reality. (The fan’s wife made no recorded
claim to be highly realized, yet still purportedly manifested that
windy “magic.” Thus, such claimed phenomena could not be restricted
here only to siddhis accompanying “great Realizers,” etc.)
Short of Treya’s death actually having affected, via real magic,
the same winds which blow not merely for Wilber but for all of us,
his implicit view of that phenomenon
is simply reflective of mythic and magical thinking. That’s
okay, but it’s not rational and if Wilber were to critique his
own episode he would see it (via his spectrum psychology
paradigm) as being “immature” (less inclusive, less rational,
etc.)....
Thus when I said Wilber was being narcissistic in his
analysis of those winds, I was using the very adjective that
Wilber himself on several occasions has used to illustrate a
pre/trans fallacy, a mistake where the New Ager or whomever
in question sees something mystical when it was merely
mythic, where someone sees something paranormal when it
was merely normal (Lane, 1996).
Note that Lane insightfully spotted that point a full four years
prior to Wilber’s reprinting of the “grey cloud” fan letter.
In relation to all of the above paranormality, further consider
the following recent perspective from Wilber (2003) himself, in expounding
on the nature of the chakras in his “comprehensive theory
of subtle energies”:
I will ... simply use one example: the overall summary of the
chakras given by Hiroshi Motoyama.
Wilber then goes on to explain, for his own demonstrative purposes,
Motoyama’s standard and non-controversial “theories of the
chakras,” from his book of the same name. (Motoyama himself is
founder and president of the California Institute for Human Science:
www.cihs.edu.)
There is, however, much more to Motoyama’s (2000) Karma
and Reincarnation worldview than that: