While the Cat's away, the mice will play.

Buried in an earlier post, here, was the information that Blogmandu Roundups are on hiatus through the summer.

They will be back, in full force and refreshed on Saturday, Sept. 23, the first day of autumn, reporting on the Buddhoblogosphere for the week of Sep 17-23.

I am happy to find that tinythinker of peaceful turmoil is taking up the slack, at present, bringing roundups for the last two weeks.

Please check out his excellent roundups of June 15 and June 22. And while you're there, check out the other delights of peaceful turmoil and consider adding pt to your blogroll and RSS reader.

I hope tinythinker keeps up his swell roundups! I don't mind the whiff of competition; the idea is to increase the connectivity between blogs!

-- Tom

Ken Wilber ... Madness

At the end of the film “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” Major Clipton surveys the dead from the battle downriver and the destruction of the bridge and train and repeats one word, slowly, “Madness! … Madness! …”

Ken Wilber puts up his follow-up to his two earlier Earp-Test posts [1] & [2] that features a kiss-ass email that he considers to be kick-butt. The mad Wilber titles this new post “The Unbearable Lightness of Wyatt Earpy.” He seems to be pursuing a movie theme.

Wilber doesn’t talk about it, but “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” is a romance, of sorts, that takes place mostly in the Czechoslovakia capital during Prague Spring, in 1968, and includes the Soviet invasion that put an end to a short bout of freedom. To my mind, the tight control that Wilber wields over Integral, the cult of personality that sweeps through his online presence, his unwillingness to engage in non-conforming dialogue at iN, and his elitism overlay that must certainly be a contortion of the true 2nd Tier, makes him an ugly taskmaster in that story of liberation. By making himself central instead of his insights; by controlling the levers and making his iterations of changes to Integral the line of acceptable dogma, he and his soldiers are a tank squadron presence in the Streets of the Spiritual. Perhaps we all should be so light in our being in the world that the tanks don't matter. But that wouldn’t excuse an effort to dampen down dissent.

In his new post, Wilber presents an email he received from Geert Drieghe that is gushing in praise of Wilber and that insult act in his first post. Here is part of that email:

I think it's a great example of a multilayered post that really addresses several meme levels at once, a feat which is not lightly done. When I read it I feel like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind where he is taken into a FBI facility to read encrypted texts and where all the relevant words show up. For somebody at green all the cuss words and the rants show up, but for somebody at turquoise the lightness shines out, different words and strings of words light up. It would be really interesting to analyze how you did that.

Here is part of Wilber’s response:

[It was] meant to convey what I believe are extremely important ideas, and thus indeed it was written with multilevel meanings, and that multilayered writing was something I worked at quite hard, especially as it went through several drafts, and thus it is what you call “a piece of art” …

“A Beautiful Mind,” the movie, was for the most part a bad adaptation of an excellent biography of the same name about mathematics genius John Nash. But the film does do a good job focusing on Nash’s descent into madness, an important theme in the book. Quickly, Nash is of no aid to the government as he begins to read false messages everywhere. It is, perhaps, too much to hope that Geert is sending Wilber a message that he should be able to find among the email's lines: “Hey, Wilber, you're losing it.”

In David Berreby’s book Us and Them: Understanding Your Tribal Mind, there’s a chapter “Them, We Burn.” It talks about how we learn the standards and rituals of our culture and how we need a network of unwritten regulations and performance cues to act in a society and to understand one another. We all have “an innate knack for learning ‘our’ [the tribe’s] rules.” These things teach us what to eat, when to eat it, when to be emotional and when to be blasé. We understand others better if they are using cues similar to our own. One reason we can enjoy a foreign country and find it particularly exotic is if the culture is undergirded by a set of cues curiously different from our own. Part of what we learn is how to react to cuss words.

I would contend that Wilber isn’t having any insight about grand spiritual advancement relating to ego loss and oceanic acceptance; he is, instead, rather pitifully, creating new societal/tribe rules – rules that are only rather arbitrary and only conveniently contrary to the great society in which he functions. By doing this, he manufactures a loyal, willing tribe of folks that are all too obsequious. They have to be obsequious because one of the rules of the crawlspace, fake 2nd Tier that he writes the rules for is that Wilber is never wrong and that questioning him or failing to praise his every burp is likely to get you remanded to the dreaded 1st Tier.

In some societies you find people who are 'set off' by disrespect or by utterances of cuss words. This is learned behavior that lingers. Certainly, degrees of tolerance which becomes acceptance which becomes radical acceptance is involved in spiritual advancement. And these more-liberal cultural cues begin to replace what might be the conservative cues of one's culture and upbringing. But these "group bonding" cues are not the story of spiritual climb. Indeed, group bonding is tribal [purple meme] and causal for friction between people. [As I wrote in an earlier post, "kind" scientists have shown that it isn't friction that causes people to form groups; it is grouping that causes friction.]

So, Wilber's hot inauthentic posts about feather ruffling are really acts of tribe creation. Wilber is creating a tribe in his own likeness. And looking at Him, we are all supposed to see the Face of God.

Madness! … Madness! …

The Rattlesnake post was NOT A TEST

The following is one of the more controversial posts on this
site. Please enjoy but with a warning: without giving too much away, please be
advised that while Tom is definitely serious about the basic content and ideas,
both the tone and the language were selected for a reason, so don't get your
feathers ruffled. Read on....--The Editor

Contrary to what I said in my prior post, "Is Zaadz a Den of Rattlesnakes!?" was never intended as a test and I was never in contact with Ken Wilber.

Is Zaadz a Den of Rattlesnakes!? is a rambling, poorly constructed statement of what I believed at the time I wrote it and I support what it says now. It is about groups and that a scientist who studies groups tells us that the insular nature of groups creates friction rather than what we suppose -- that friction within society creates a need for insular groups. It is also about some creepy groups that remind me a little of Zaadz - which has a mission and plan that are cartoonish. I have no doubt that the way I wrote my essay, and defended it, tags me for being first tier. But my post has the virtue of being an authentic, straightforward statement of what I think on a topic and a situation which I believe is important. It is true that when I wrote my essay I also had I-I in the back of my mind.

I am somewhat sorry I wrote the post “The Rattlesnake post was A TEST.” The devil made me do it. But "Is Zaadz a Den of Rattlesnakes!?" is a test - an authentic, unintended one - as much as was Wilber’s semi-fraud of a post, using bloggers as guinea pigs. The response to IZaDoR!? was as feather ruffling as Wilber’s Earp post, only instead of revealing possible deficiencies and spiritual weaknesses in integral-interested bloggers, it revealed nastiness and groupthink in the heart of Zaadz. There’s no getting away from it. The lesson – it seems to me – is that groups that endeavor to be insular create groupthink that intensifies discord. We see this in Wilber's 'Real Meaning' post, where Wilber finds, naturally, that a majority at I-I agree with any fool thing he wants to do. The integral-interested blogosphere, more laudably, is a rabble of independent thinkers, swimming in the Internet Ocean instead of some inland, walled-off social-networking zoo or Maoist temple.

To the credit of the integral-interested blogosphere, in which I include myself as a marginal member, I don’t know any one of us who have committed statutory rape, and, other than ~C4Chaos, none of are insiders to a cult of personality. Also, none of us sign our names with an unlucky number and only one of us carries an octopus on his shoulder.

I am fully aware that that last paragraph, and most or all of this post, is ordinary-minded, not Big Minded in the way it's written. But I think y'all can handle it without getting your feathers mussed.

I think it is sad, but in the end a good thing, that Wilber's Earp post is chasing Bill Lalonde, Bill Harryman and me, each in different ways, away from Wilberism. I think that the Earp post and its followup is a failure from any perspective, but it would be impossible for anybody close to Wilber to tell him this.

The Rattlesnake post was A TEST.

Ken Wilber has emailed me and says that now I should let you all know.

My Rattlesnake post of a few weeks ago, Is Zaadz a Den of Rattlesnakes!? was all a test to separate the first-tier from Integral second- and third-tier folks.

As many of you know by now, Wilber revealed in his blog today that his post on Jun 8, What We Are, What We See, was really all a test. [See the follow-up post What We Are, What We See, Part II.]

Ken contacted me and said that he also wanted to test and play with some other people he works we, so I worked with him to develop the Rattlesnake post. It was a great, great honor to be contacted by him for this project. I had exchanged emails with him a couple of times over the years, and I know he was aware of my blog -- but just imagine my surprize.

So. The deal with the Rattlesnake post and your reactions to it are the same as with Wilber's 'What We See, What We Are' post.

Here is how the assessment works:

This is Bill Maher on the type of awareness that pervades this country—and, of course, its blogosphere.

I wouldn’t ever say there’s censorship in this country. But there’s a lot of peer pressure. Because when anybody says anything that’s the least bit feather ruffling, everybody just goes nuts. If anybody in this country is forced to undergo a single moment of discomfort, the person who caused it just must go away.

Maher is probably right about perhaps 98% of this gosh darn country, and its blogosphere, where, if feathers are ruffled, out come rants that are depressingly predictable in structure, tone, and form. But the reason I love the blogosphere is for the 2% that are not predictable, that do not merely rant against the moment of discomfort (and its cause), but rather stand above the herd mentality and post from second tier. I’ll come back to that 2% in a moment. Because if you are in that 2%, I’d really like to speak with you.

So, if you are part of the crusty 2%, be aware that Ken will be contacting you. If not, you know where you are.

Peace and high regards,
--Tom

The Mighty Ken Blows

“… every once in a while it gets so bad you just have to blow off steam, because it really hurts, ya know? And like I said, every decade or so, I blow.”
-- Ken Wilber in KenWilberBlog, ‘The Wanger’ post*, 6/8/06

A storm of commentary swirled in the Integral section of the Buddhoblogosphere after Ken Wilber posted a bitter, raunchy 5,000-word post in his blog on 6/8, intended, it seemed, to bring pain to his enemies. The essay, which B'du has dubbed 'The Wanger' post*, seems to be, in the main, a rather non-substantive denunciation of Frank Vissar’s May 2006 essay at the website Integral World, “Talking Back to Wilber,” that chides The Ken for not responding to the many critical essays that have amassed of Wilber’s theories at Integral World. Vissar concludes his essay, “I am looking forward to a future with many integral journals and conferences, where integral concepts are openly discussed – both as to their strengths but even more so as to their weaknesses, both online and in the offline world. That's the only way it can mature beyond the limitations it currently has. Without it, integral might very well end up as an ideology.”

In his blog post, Wilber identified with Wyatt Earp – because, Earp was, in Wilber’s estimation, like him in being the leading figure in his field and in having gun-slingers out there filling his ass with lead. [Actually, Earp was a courageous and sometimes ethics-challenged lawman and businessman whose ass stayed remarkably unmarred. See wikipedia listing. But, be that as it may.]

Wilber uses course language several times, at one point telling a critic, “simply suck my dick.” He also says that anyone who disagrees with his course phrase is necessarily a backward green memester. {He softens this later, writing “I’m not saying that anybody [who finds this post repulsive] is green; just that anybody who is green [will find it repulsive].}

Integral bloggers’ reactions to W’s post were mixed, with many either alienated by Wilber’s post or disappointed with it. Others, wondered if it is a test or, in B'du reporter's case, a mean-green satire of some sort. And a third segment, Wilber sycophants, delighted in its freshness, humor and joy-filled decadence. Of course, members in this third segment might be in on the hoax, if there is one. But, in any case, the bloggers’ reactions proved that Derrida lives! Deconstructing Wilber’s post somewhat became all the rage.

A question B’du reporter has: If Wilber did join the Dark Side of the Force, what would we expect to see from him in terms of a blog post? Wouldn’t we expect a first act to be an attempt to blow up Integral World with its snakepit of detractors, much as Darth Vadar blew up a world that resisted his powers? And doesn’t ‘the Wanger post’* seem to attempt to do precisely this!

But in his post “Integral Wild West,” Dashh is surely onto something, if all his references make sense. [I say this because it is hard to trust anyone when hoax possibilities are with us.] Dashh writes,

The more I think about it the more I wonder if it just another attempt at an SD [Spiral Dynamics] integral Voight-Kampff Test ala Blade Runner ala the essay written to gauge responses of David Deida's Ken Wilber is a Fraud essay years back. If you are 'blue' you reacted this way...if you are 'orange' this is the typical response...I'm sure it is only a matter of days before the posts at integral blogs and maybe even Wilber's start to analyse and frame everyone's responses in terms of SD.

Happily, B'du reporter is expecting that, in accord with Wilber 6.0, this here post will show that this reporter is in the clear meme which is third tier, rising above yellow, coral, teal, indigo and muave.

One reason to think that Wilber is pulling a hoax or spoofing something or poking his readers is that W recently posted a review of V for Vendetta, backdating it to March. It is perhaps the case that Wilber and Annie McQuade are taking the roles of V and Natalie Portman's character in a terrorist act of blowing up parliament [Integral World]. But if Wilber and McQuade are goofing on people or are testing people, it surely might say something uncomely about them and where their spiritual heads are at, under the masque.

===

* I am calling KW’s instantly famous post “The Wanger Post” since wanger means the male member, someone who jerks off and/or anger AND wanger begins with a W [for Wilber and Wyatt] and ends in a-n-g-e-r. Also, Wanger is the name of the composer of “The Ride of the Valkyries” to someone who has dyslexia. Somewhat like Wilber – to a few folk, maybe – Wagner is someone whose work you can love, but you kind of want to ignore the person behind it.

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