stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

540 STRIPPING THE GURUS
through Wilber-4, with Wilber-5 already on the way.
Bohm’s thought, too, advanced through comparable stages,
even though it has never been categorized as “Bohm-1,”
etc. Wilber-2 was not merely a derogatory “epicycle” tacked
onto Wilber-1, and so on (though his grafted-on lines of development
are close to being exactly that). The same tolerance
should obviously apply to one’s view of the sequential
development of Bohm’s levels of implicate order
Wilber’s improvements to his model of consciousness are
grounded in empirical research in psychology. Bohm’s levels of implicate
order, likewise, are certainly based on empirical research in
physics. Indeed, they are grounded in measurement to a far greater
degree of precision than one will find in any of Wilber’s own
work, or for that matter in anything extant in transpersonal psychology
or integral studies.
Bohm is thus guilty of neither “bad physics” nor of “bad mysticism.”
Wilber, however, is embarrassingly culpable, if not for both
of those, then for the worse repeated violence against a mere
“straw man” misrepresentation, created by no one but himself, of
Bohm’s ideas.
Amazingly, none of the points discussed here require an advanced
understanding of physics or mathematics in order for one
to sort fact from fiction. Rather, all that they ever required was for
one to read Bohm’s self-popularized ideas carefully, and thus to
properly understand them.
Note further that, through all of this, no “interpretation” of
Bohm’s ideas is involved. Rather, all that one has to do is to look at
what Bohm actually said in print, and compare that with Wilber’s
presentation of the same ideas—often in the same (1982) book, no
less—to see the glaring distortions in the latter.
* * *
In writing this defense, I have been given pause to wonder why
Bohm himself never responded to Wilber’s original (and relatively
well-tempered, compared to the gratuitous unkindness in [1998]
and [2003]) critique. For, nearly everything quoted throughout this
paper was already present in Bohm’s own published writings. Indeed,
anything which wasn’t already in print two decades ago
could easily have been produced by him in writing “over a weekend.”