stripping the gurus - Brahma Kumaris Info

544 STRIPPING THE GURUS
the work of others, while claiming that it either supported his, or
was allegedly “wrong” and thus failed to buttress his own.
There may well be other issues along that line. There may
well be many other issues, both of active misrepresentation and of
selective inclusion/exclusion, in kw’s integral forays into psychology,
physics, history, education, politics, ecology, etc. Indeed, would
it not be odd, by now, if there weren’t additional problems? Any
betting man or woman....
Thankfully, though, “nobody is smart enough to be wrong all
the time.”
Is he?
Note: I submitted (and received confirmation of receipt for) a slightly
less polished (and less spicy) version of this paper to The Journal of
Transpersonal Psychology, for peer/leprechaun review, in November of
2003. That process “generally takes 6+ months.” As of June, 2005, I
have yet to receive a verdict from them as to whether properly researched
and coherent ideas such as these have a place among their
other “make believe” theorizings. Nor am I optimistic about that status
changing.
No surprise, then, that there are so few published criticisms of
Wilber’s work, if that is what happens to even the most thorough of
them. (Compare also de Quincey’s claimed experiences with the “Wilber
police.”)
But all of that is hardly surprising. For, as they say on the South
Park campus of Integral University: “You bastard! You killed [our deferential
regard for] Kenny!”
A little rational thought, a little competent research, a little questioning
of their heroes, and they run away from documented uncomplimentary
facts like a bunch of frightened little ninny bunnies. And
that, of course, only makes one wonder all the more what full quantity
of sanctioned idiocy they may be hiding from rational scrutiny
amongst their leprechauns, courses in imagined “miracles,” “verified
mediums,” and “Einsteins” who cannot even get high-school-level ideas
right. (In any field of real scholarship, Wilber would long ago have
been seen for the “Velikovsky” that he is, and mocked or ignored accordingly.
Only because he exists in a discipline where his peers are
even less aware of what science and proper research look like than he
himself is, has he risen to the status of a “genius” rather than a recognized
laughingstock.)
Can transpersonal and integral “scholars” really be so deeply
fearful of the possibility that to think clearly about what they believe