Integral World

"Since 2002, and intensifying aroud 2006, I have published several essays on Integral World which are quite critical of Ken Wilber, both by myself and others. My stated aim in doing this has always been to stimulate a debate on the value of Wilber's proposals."

"The life and career of Ken Wilber is nothing if not interesting. A google search will reveal that episodes and chapters of recent years involve Wilber losing former fans, readers, followers, and promoters. Why? "

"The trouble with Ken Wilber, if you ask me, is that, for all his academic phraseology, he is not embedded in a corrective academic community. Instead, he has created a community of admirers of his own, in which he rules supreme. As King in his Integral Castle, his stance is isolationist, aloof, authoritarian – integral ideology is then just around the corner. And I don't mean by "embedded in academia" loading your books with academic endnotes, or teaching integral ideas to the younger generation, or offering accredited courses in some universities such as JFK, let alone starting a university of your own (Integral University). I mean opening up your own views to specialists in the various fields (postmodernism, evolutionary biology, political science) who can reflect and respond to your proposals. When it comes to the evaluation of Wilber's work, Wilber himself obviously cannot be the one in charge."

"In Geoffrey Falk's recent Integral World essay The Salmon of Belief: Comments on the Status of Psi Research, he offers his usual knowledgeable, witty, skeptical, and highly internet informed perspective of the fallacy of mystical and/or psychic claims. Falk's essay is in response to Don Salmon and Jan Maslow's Integral World article The Challenge of Writing About Sri Aurobindo's Integral Psychology.."

"Well, sometimes you can get the right answer for the wrong conscious reasons; blink and call it "intuition." Since 1951, Joseph B. Rhine's work has been debunked to a point that would unconvince us on almost any other issue. Just read the SkepDic entries which mention that particularly inept fool. We're dealing there with someone who not only thought that Lady the "talking" horse was psychic, but also "believed that persons who disliked him guessed wrong to spite him" on ESP tests ... and correspondingly excluded their low scores from his statistics."

"My wife (Jan) and I recently published a book entitled, Yoga Psychology and the Transformation of Consciousness: Seeing Through the Eyes of Infinity (Paragon House). We used the psychological vision of the Indian poet/yogi Sri Aurobindo as our basis - a vision which for more than 60 years has been referred to as "integral psychology". However, we drew widely from the Indian tradition as a whole and because of this, we eventually settled on the term "yoga psychology" as one which embraced both Sri Aurobindo and the general Indian yogic tradition. "

"The "world of science" and the "world of religion" are at clash on the question whether the dogmas of the one or the dogmas of the other should be brainwashed into the young through the teaching establishments, especially through the American and some other western schools, and thus into the public consciousness and subconsciousness of the present generation, perpetuated hence also for the future ones. And the scientific and religious fundamentalists join hands in their fight against natural spirituality originated in expanded consciousness and rational thinking: active perception, active intelligence and active ethics. "

"Evolution is in all its manifestations an intellectual affair, and represents for every entity the advancement of its mental power in overcoming its actual psychical and physical limitations. This applies as much to the elementary particles as to the universe as a whole, and signifies that neither is complete in its present state, but is continually evolving."

"In addition to creating a new map as I have done, one could also change Wilber's map in such a way that many or most of its limitations are overcome. To achieve this, one would have to add instructions to his map that would allow for complementary interpretations. Since he also presented his map as an Integral Operating System (IOS 1.0), one would enrich this basic version by creating a more inclusive version. Here are some specific suggestions on how to achieve this."

"Is in-sight point-less? In-sight isn't a construct or a belief-system we can learn or study; in-sight isn't something that we can make happen, nor something that we can force; in-sight arises on its own accord. "

"A human holon represents a phenomena that is whole in itself (our individual person), while it is equally part of another phenomena (our shared reality). The defining characteristic or quality of a human holon is language, which is the matrix of the mind-space."

"This paper surveys the development of Ken Wilber's Integral metatheory to date through five main phases over thirty-five years, twenty-plus books, and numerous articles."

"AQAL integral meta-theory relies on time. Ken Wilber's magnificent articulation of the unfolding of the manifest world is rooted in the timeless nondual, but even the subtlest of differentiations within this omnipotent creative matrix establishes a movement, a fluid and polar relationship. Even the incomprehensible quantum vacuum, unencumbered by concrete events, appears to have a temporal structure. Time is fundamental – perhaps primary – to our understanding of the universe, and thus an indispensable component of any integral theory."