What the Falk?

I know I've had my criticisms of Ken Wilber/I-I/IU and the integral community as of late but it is always with an underlying respect and compassion. I can hardly say the same for Geoffrey Falk's critique of Wilber in his online book Stripping the Gurus.

With the title of his chapter on Wilber called "Norman Einstein," itself a tactless slap at Wilber, Falk attempts to deconstruct and "strip" Wilber of his 30 years of theoretical writing that many have deep respect for with various attacks on his character. While reading this chapter, I did find several good points and grains of truth that anyone interested in Wilber's work should explore. However, Falk's interspersed rhetoric and ad hominem attacks leave a lot to be desired and I would surprised if anyone will take away those grains given his tone. It is one thing for those that have had experienced personal incidents with Wilber (i.e., Matthew Dallman, Michel Bauwens) to bring those to light for better or worse, but Falk’s tactics just seem plain tactless. For someone who is so quick to point out Wilber's "lack of high school knowledge," I wonder if Falk himself paid very much attention in his English or Writing 101 classes in the past. I mean, go ahead and criticize away but do so with some skills besides referring to Ken’s second wife as “stacked,” and saying, “I myself am (thankfully) no part of the Integral Naked ‘intellectual circle jerk’ community—led by the ‘Pee-Wee Herman of consciousness studies.’ What are we back in high school? Oh and Pee-Wee rocked back in the day…”Paging Mr. Herman…Mr. Herman…”ok obscure reference that most of you probably won't get but it was a funny movie...hehe

So if you can look past the pop psych analyses and out of context quotes check it out sometime and see what you think…

Comments

[Jeff Shampnois]

Falk uses ad hominem attacks. I do agree with his defence of Bohm however. Wilber misunderstood it. But I'd like to make a broader point and I apologize if I go on too long.
A long metaphor: our heads are (at least for the
length of this metaphor) like radios. They're tuned to static and country music most of the time. They spit and sputter and then Rush Limbaugh comes on or something.

But they also receive, like an antennae too.

Once in a while, our radio heads get tuned to something pristine and beautiful. Then what usually follows is lots of internal talk show jibberish about that one lonely moment of beauty in our lives. That moment was in the airwaves, not something in us, but then it becomes just more tatic in our heads. Some things we perceive (or receive) and some things we spew out, think (or transmit).

Sometimes we hear a beautiful frequency from another radio. We receive it and by doing so immediately oscillate to the same frequency in the air. Wow, that's a beautiful frequency. But it's not made by the other radio, just initially received by it.

Let's say one radio says "hey, listen to that frequency in that radio, it's beautiful." But instead of tuning into the frequency, the other people focus on the radio itself. They praise it for a while, saying, oh what a special radio.

Another group of people say "I don't want to listen to that frequency until I know if that radio is good or bad. Where was it made? What's its history? How can we trust it?"

But it's just a frigging radio picking up frequencies. They could tune to the same frequency and determine if there's anything there that's real or not without going through the never provable rigamarole of personal trust.

Why do people concern themselves with the personality of a writer or teacher, his foibles, his saintliness or unsaintliness, his personality (the color of the radio, its design) but not look to see if what he or she says reveals some beauty or truth (the frequency)? Why do they try to understand what he or she says indirectly, through the easily distorted filter of
biography, personality, rather than directly through the perceptions themselves?

Let's say the radio picks up a fantastically well-ordered frequency. And then for a while it loses it and brings in all kinds of static. The people who focus on the radio, who love that radio, who think that radio itself is generating these frequencies, are
highly disappointed when they hear static. They call
that radio a hypocrite, a piece of junk and angrily
dismiss everything that this radio had brought in.
Even the beauty seems to them spoiled now.

But isn't that how a realistic life goes? It comes in and out of focus with some higher order? And when those higher orders are in focus it's the order not the person that is of interest. So why do people spend so much time praising radios instead of examining frequencies?

If I say, for instance, bohm or krishnamurti, are worth reading, I may in fact praise those radios for being especially good instruments, but that's all they are. (And that’s all they claimed to be). I don't want to be rude to them, I admire the radios for their clarity, but they're not the issue. It's the frequencies that are of interest.

Bohm, for instance, was often deeply depressed and
unsure of himself. Sometimes he was out of focus. Krishnamurti had a mistress (the wife of a friend no less, although the marriage was nothing but name by that time) for a long time. People say he was a hypocrite because he kept it private and spoke often of the need for celibacy. There was static in his life too no doubt. Einstein was often rude and arrogant, especially towards his first wife, and may have stolen some of
her work. Not good but that’s not all he was. The focus came and went. Gandhi supposedly slept with a few young women while he was married. Do we dismiss his great insights? Does the theory of relativity suffer from Einstein’s foibles? They were, in other words, human beings who brought something of tremendous order into the audible. I’m not concerned with “finding” a person who is the “one.” That’s
sickening. It's the pitch itself that is moving.

A radio like Falwell or Bush has no beautiful pitch. They only attract attention to themselves, not the universe.

What is this societal need to find the underlying
foibles of those who have brought a pitch into focus?
I think it shows how much we think truth lies in
personality, and how dependent we are for “leaders”.
Bush and Falwell, Gandhhi and Einstein are all, at
best, bunched together as famous personalities,
potential leaders who disappoint us, who need exposure (truth). At worst, Bush and Falwell have more influence because their personalities are more easily believed by a segment of the mainstream. They are better salesmen for some. But either way it all stays on the level of personality. The mainstream rarely talks about the frequencies revealed by the Gandhis and Einsteins. And the absence of truth in Falwell and Bush. Direct truth is of little concern. Indirect truth of personality is the whole ball game.

I mean, a person’s life and actions can’t be known
the way frequencies can be known. Directly. It’s the
heavy doses of righteousness in "exposures" that
indicate to me a distorted dependency on them as
leaders and a failure to see what they brought into
focus. We put our trust in radios and hate them for
not being more than that. Meanwhile, we never focus on what they revealed about life itself.

I guess I’m just so sick of the way this society
trashes and worships personalities rather than looks for itself at what is true and false. The
right wing talk shows focus on this ad hominine level constantly. But even supposedly good thinkers use dismissive generalizations regarding an entire realm of inquiry or point of view. Prior to the Afghan war anti-war protesters were dismissed by many liberal writers too as “a few granola-chewing college kids”.
So all the points that were raised were trashed in a cartoon image. And you can find this going on at all levels.

But the other side of the coin is the treasuring of a
personality. The readiness to abandon the entire
frequency they uncovered in anger like a jilted lover. It’s the same concern in reverse. Why support a person, and not discover if they opened up something beautifully true or not for ourselves?

This society is mud-splattering mayhem. Very
disappointing.