stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

NORMAN EINSTEIN 211
[M]ost men, including those at ease with problems of the
greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and
most obvious [reported] truth if it be such as would oblige
them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted
in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly
taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by
thread, into the fabric of their lives.
—Leo Tolstoy
We all get fooled for short periods of time, or even for years.
Hell, for two months after I first read Wilber, I too bought into the
idea that he was an “Einstein.” (Ah, “to be that young again.”) But
to get fooled for the rest of one’s life, investing huge amounts of
emotional energy into maintaining that fiction, is in no way a good
thing. And to further base one’s professional standing on that, in a
visibly public commitment which one cannot back out of without
invaliding the bulk of one’s own life’s work, is when things become,
as Wilber would say, “problematic.”
Wilber and his supporters in the Integral Institute may not
like [criticism such as Jeff Meyerhoff’s (2003) book, Bald
Ambition], but if they are really serious about getting beyond
what is looking more and more like a [so-called] cult surrounding
Wilber, they better get used to it (Smith, 2004; italics
added).
[I]t appears that Ken Wilber stands as judge, jury and executioner
when it comes to the matter of who is, and who is not,
integral enough....
[H]ow integral is an institution that excludes dissenting
voices? Isn’t such an exclusion of dissent itself also evidence
for a lack of true Integralism? (Peckinpaugh, 2004).
For more on that same topic, including an openly “antagonistic
and arrogant response” from one of Wilber’s blindly loyal fans to a
respectfully stated concern, see Taylor (2003). There, Wilber’s Integral
Naked website is (rightly, I believe) categorized by critics as
being constituted of “a bunch of poseurs at an intellectual masturbation
party”—a group of “good ol’ boys chewin’ the fat and slingin’
back the whiskies.”
Don Beck’s (2005) alarmingly intolerant view of the WHAT
enlightenment??! website fares no better. For there, he reportedly
regards the disillusioned former admirers of Cohen executing that