stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

208 STRIPPING THE GURUS
Either way, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice,
shame on me.”
Of course, if stick-swinging “Rude Boys” who’ll “roast your ass”
(“breathing fire” over “hot coals” while “frying your ego,” etc.) are
really what get you hot....
In any case, none of that lamentable behavior on Wilber’s part
could do anything to lower the regard given him by his friends and
followers, or even touted by himself for himself:
On a practical level, Wilber’s greatest contribution may be as
a critic of teachers, gurus, techniques, ideas, and systems
that promise routes to encompassing truth but are in fact incomplete,
misleading, or misguided. “I’m the guy,” Wilber
told me only half-jokingly, “who comes in after the party and
tries to straighten up the mess” (Schwartz, 1996).
In any such self-appointed cleaning, however, one must take
care that one does not accidentally knock over the half-empty bottles
from the night before, or carelessly dump the ashtrays onto the
floor, lest one create an even greater mess than one began with.
One need not be the “Molly Maid of consciousness studies”
to see that.
In the end, then, David Lane (1996) put it very well:
When it comes to guru appraisements, Wilber is just plain
naïve. He is as gullible as the rest of us and given his track
record with Da perhaps more so.
What is perhaps so worrisome about all of this, of
course, is that Wilber does not show the kind of level-headed
discrimination that is necessary to separate the wheat from
the chaff. It would be one thing to admit to a bit of “greenness”
(e.g., “Hey, I am a sucker when it comes to perfect masters”),
but it is quite another to pose like you are a seasoned
veteran of the guru wars.
More recently, Wilber has contributed a philosophical commentary
track for the DVD version of the Matrix series of movies,
at the invitation of the Wachowski brothers.
If he’s done as well there as in his other endeavors, Hollywood
may never recover.
* * *