Letters to the Editor
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Two tests for any self-proclaimed guru/prophet/sage
1) Do his actions reflect his teachings?
Is he kind, compassionate, generous, loving, forgiving, magnanimous, fair-minded, humble, self-sacrificing, just?
Or is he haughty, self-aggrandizing, condescending, ostentatious, abrasive, greedy, opportunistic, and prejudiced?
Does he practice what he preaches?
2) Does he have a sense of humor about himself? Can he take a joke? Does he have the maturity to admit that he may be wrong?
I don't know enough about Ken Wilber the person, but the fact that he has such an aggressive marketing campaign around himself (including several books with his big bald head plastered across the cover) makes me question his spiritual maturity.
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GW in Ohio
Thanks for responding - that is what I thought you meant. To paraphrase, god is a mental state of oneness, clarity, calm, quite joy, etc.
My question is why use such a loaded word, "god," to describe that? Why used a term that humans have argued about for millenia?
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correction to last post
"quiet" joy, not quite joy.
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The philosophy of science?
Science isn't interested in proving or disproving any type or category or religion. Science, by definition, is concerned only with observable facts and models of the those facts.
If a scientist comments on the so called religious implications of his or her work, he or she has stopped practicing science for that moment.
There may be philosophers of science who are concerned with such issues, but they are not scientists.
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@upsilamba
As far as I know, Wilber has never "proclaimed" himself anything, he's just a wicked bright guy who has come up with a pretty clever view of reality that a lot of people have found useful.
In so doing, some people - including some otherwise-rational friends of mine - have glommed onto him in a way that I find rather embarrassing. But, I haven't seen Wilber go out of his way to attract such attention.
The fact that his chrome-dome sells books probably have more to do with the new-age marketing geniuses at Shambhala than any aspiration Wilber may have to guruhood (I have heard him refer to himself humourously as a pandit, which is the root word of "pundit" in modern parlance).
Like you, however, "I don't know enough about Ken Wilber the person." I'm more interested in the philosophy than the personality, though.
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Theist schmeist, atheist schmatheist
I suppose the theists could have turned up, but today for this interview it was the atheists. They sounded angry and unhappy. A little too much hair trigger.
I'm surprised Ken Wilber doesn't know better ways to talk to atheists. When he talks about God or godhead as terms for egoless oneness, he doesn't say that it doesn't have to be God. You don't have to think of the experience of oneness as having anything to do with God. Or you could. And God doesn't have to be a guy in the sky. It doesn't matter. It's still the same brain chemistry, and if you want to think we're just machines firing off our electrochemical neuronal activity, knock yourself out. If you want to think a guy in the sky's firing off your neurons, which I don't, knock yourself out.
For sure, most God believers haven't had a moment of egoless oneness and think of God as something quite different. But some have and do.
I'm in recovery and have known atheists who were going down the tubes with one addiction or another - even just with dysfunctionality - and sought and found the kind of interconnection that egoless oneness brings, which saved their asses. And they're still atheists. They weren't tricked into believing. I know creative atheists who've done similar activation of their neurochemistry, as did Einstein coming up with E=MC2. So I don't know why today's atheist posters aren't giving Ken Wilber a look. You don't have to do a drug to make the most of your neurochemistry. What some mean by God or higher power or spirit can be taken in an entirely secular way. See Chogyam Trungpa's "Shambala."
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(More, for free: google "Rabid Fanatic" +"Monty Johnston")
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Please, Mr. Wilber, take your Lithium!
Wilber's rantings are nothing more than the product of his brain in hypomanic overdrive (which I'm sure is a pleasant - and seemingly powerful - experience for him) complicated by a bit of generalized seizure activity. This is producing a vision of self-superiority, resulting in his racing from one end of the intellectual universe to the other to imperially force knowledge and fantasy together by his own, self-generated laws. Unfortunately, he believes he's actually making sense of it all...it's just a bad dream dude!
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jazztao, Monty Johnson
jazztao, I'd say it's a historical understanding, not one from a brain scan, but no less material for that.
Monty Johnston, as an atheist, I say hear, hear to that!
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And the river flows to the sea.
I once called Wilber a 'skin headed dude', among other things. Evidently, even though I apologized, Ken found my remarks humorous... so I decided right then and there that Wilber was no snooty tooty.
Obviously, with some kind of magical perception i presume, he realized I didn't mean he was like The Skin Heads (whom, from what I gather, think they are like the Nazi! Alas, there are skin heads and those with skined heads.) Of course, I was simply referring to Wilber's bright, semi-reflective, chrome dome. Air Wilber, I've taken to calling him.
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'...And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momentarily the sacred river.'
bah.
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Keep on hiding
I'm so tired of new agers like Ken Wilber insisting that certain realms of study are entirely out of the reach of science. All they're doing is hiding their religion just beyond fringes of scientific understanding. Placing it there has a couple of advantages: first, it allows them to wrap their beliefs in scientific-sounding language, and second, it invariably involves drawing an arbitrary circle around one field of study and declaring the observed phenomena to be unanswerable by science.
Neuroscience is one of those fields of study. It's a very new field, and there's still a lot we have to learn. And yet, people like Wilber have already decided that it is impossible for us to understand his mystical experiences because they're.... well... special.
This reminds me of a line from the play "Inherit the Wind" where a character (I believe it was the William Jennings Bryan character) said that he wouldn't trust anything scientists say about the origin of species until they can explain how a watermelon can grow from a tiny seed. I'm sure that if he made that speech today, he surely wouldn't appeal to something we understand pretty well, like developmental biology, and would instead appeal to our incomplete understanding of consciousness.